Kerry: Snowden should 'man up' and return to U.S.

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called for fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to "man up" and return to the United States to face the legal consequences for his leaks about sweeping U.S. surveillance efforts.

"The bottom line is this is a man who has betrayed his country, who is sitting in Russia, an authoritarian country where he has taken refuge. He should man up and come back to the United States. If he has a complaint about what's wrong with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case," Kerry said in an interview on CBS This Morning.

In his first U.S. network television interview, a portion of which was broadcast Tuesday evening, Snowden told NBC News that he was "trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense" and rejected the notion that he was only a low-level operative. Kerry said there was nothing new in what Snowden was disclosing about his past.

"It's the same disclosure that everybody's known," he said. "You know, he very cleverly wraps it into his language about 'I was a technical person, I didn't go out there and work with humans, with other people, I wasn't working and interacting with human beings.' Basically, he was doing his computer stuff and that's exactly what he said. So he wraps it into this larger language."

The full NBC interview aired Wednesday evening.

Snowden, who leaked information about the U.S. government's sweeping surveillance efforts and is living in exile in Russia, referred to himself as a "technical expert" and said that efforts to play down his role in government operations sell him short.

"I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency undercover overseas, I've worked for the National Security Agency undercover overseas and I've worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy where I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world," Snowden said.

He added, "So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading."