In his first ever interview for American TV, fugitive and whistleblower Edward Snowden refutes Obama's claim that he was a lowly system administrator, stating he was a trained spy.

In a new interview with NBC's Brian Williams set to air this week, Snowden refuted the official statements made that he was of little importance to the NSA or the CIA in an attempt to downplay the information leak and Snowden's continued elusiveness from authorities, going on to call the statements false and "misleading".

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"I was trained as a spy", Snowden says in the interview, excerpts of which were made public on Tuesday, going on to detail his extensive training and undercover intelligence work, from being hired by the CIA in 2006 to his work at Dell, contracted to the NSA, starting in 2009 where he had first accessed the leaked documents.

The whistleblower noted that not only was he a traditional spy in the sense that he worked overseas on CIA projects, but that he worked under false pretences and with an assigned cover name, albeit still under diplomatic cover.

NBC worked for months to secure a recorded meeting as Snowden remains a fugitive in hiding overseas until today. The interview was conducted in a secret location somewhere in Moscow unknown to both Russian and US authorities.

The main responsibility for many CIA field operatives is to recruit agents within the host country to provide information, whereas Snowden was careful to note that his former employment with the CIA entailed the acquisition of information through communications technology.

Describing himself as a "technical specialist", Snowden claims he put high tech surveillance and monitoring systems to work for the benefit of the United States at all levels, "from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top".

Furthermore, Snowden notes that he was also hired as a lecturer by the Defense Intelligence Agency to train their counterintelligence staff - spy hunters and intelligence operatives focused on the spread disinformation.

The DIA confirmed that he had spoken at some of their conferences as an independent contractor and declined further comment on the subject matter of his speeches.

Official sources continue to decline to give any information on the nature of the work Snowden allegedly performed for the CIA, other sources say he worked as an IT and communications technician in their overseas station in Switzerland.

According to several former CIA operatives, the agency maintains at least a simple liaison office in every full scaled US embassy across the world, with many more working as embassy staff in high interest countries and areas such as China and Russia.

As part of working for the CIA, operatives are forced to sign a contract prohibiting them from revealing their true employment to anyone, including family members, opting for the more generic Department of Defense title.

Last year, Snowden made headlines in June last year when the NSA employee leaked numerous documents to the press. The leaks resulted in the reveal of PRISM, an internet surveillance program designed to monitor all internet traffic going through the United States with cooperation of several major internet companies such as Google and Yahoo.

Both the implicated companies and the US government suffered great criticism as a result and led to many companies rewriting the privacy policies in opposition of the NSA as well as conflicting court rulings on the legality of PRISM.

As a result, Snowden was charged with espionage under the possible penalty of death, a move which caused considerable controversy given Snowden's widespread support from the general public. He then escaped authorities and is currently residing in Russia, where he is currently under temporary asylum.

Though many politicians and media outlets have called for his pardon, Snowden remains a fugitive with former CIA director James Woolsey and other cited sources within the US intelligence community urging for his capture and sentence of the death penalty by hanging.

Snowden continues to defend his actions as being in the defense of public rights and when asked, referred to himself as neither a traitor nor hero, but as "an American".

While in exile, Snowden participated in highly publicized teleconferences at technological conferences discussing the importance of privacy with modern technology and the dangers of government surveillance.

Authors of the initial articles featuring the leaked documents, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill and Barton Gellman, recently earned their respective newspapers, The Guardian and The Washington Post, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

TagsCIA, NSA, PRISM, Edward Snowden, whistleblower, NBC, interview, spy, espionage, Brian Williams, leaked documents, Pulitzer Prize, traitor, treason, James Woolsey, Barack Obama