cough*bullshit*cough

Eddie Snowball is out there claiming he "was a high-tech spy for the CIA and NSA". That smell you're detecting...?

In excerpts of an interview with NBC's Brian Williams, Mr Snowden said he had trained as a spy "in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas - pretending to work in a job that I'm not - and even being assigned a name that was not mine".

But he described himself as a technical expert who did not recruit agents.

"What I do is I put systems to work for the US," he said. "And I've done that at all levels from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top. Now, the government might deny these things, they might frame it in certain ways and say, 'Oh well, you know, he's - he's a low-level analyst.'"

But he said he had worked for the CIA and NSA undercover, overseas, and lectured at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Mr Snowden fled the US, he had been working as a technician for Booz Allen, a giant government contractor for the National Security Agency.