Secretary of State John Kerry today said fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden should "man up" and return home to face justice for betraying his country by revealing US security secrets.
"This is a man who has betrayed his country. He should man up and come back to the US," Kerry told CBS News.
"The fact is, he has damaged his country very significantly. I find it sad and disgraceful," he said.
The US top diplomat said that he would be "delighted" for Snowden if he would return to America from Russia to make his case, and that a "real patriot" would return home.
Kerry's reaction came in response to Snowden's first television interview, broadcast by NBC, in which the 30-year- old asserted that he was "trained as a spy" and dismissed the view of Obama administration officials that he was a low-level hacker.
"I was 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," Snowden said an excerpt of the interview released by NBC.
Snowden said he had worked covertly as "a technical expert" for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, as well as as a trainer for the Defence Intelligence Agency.
Snowden was granted asylum by Russia in August last year. He has not been able to leave Russia since US charged him with espionage and revoked his passport. What he leaked sparked a national debate about privacy and security.
Snowden leaked sensitive documents about US anti-terror programmes, detailing secret telephone metadata and e-mail surveillance conducted by intelligence agencies.
President Barack Obama and military officials remain in support of mass, warrantless surveillance. But civil libertarians, technology companies and others oppose it, noting the lack of transparency.
