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By Noel Young, Correspondent

May 29, 2014 | 7 min read

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in an exclusive NBC interview with Brian Williams broadcast late last night has made it clear he wants to return to the United States.

“ “If I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home,” he told Williams.

But there would have to be a deal. There was no way, said 30-year-old Snowden that he would “walk into a jail cell.”

Snowden,asked by Williams if he saw himself as a patriot in making his revelations said firmly “I do.”

But he went on, “I think patriot is a word that's thrown around so much that it can devalued nowadays. Being a patriot doesn't mean prioritising service to government above all else.

“Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries.

“They can be bad policies. They can be officials who, you know, need a little bit more accountability. They can be mistakes of government and — and simple overreach and — and things that — that should never have been tried, or — or that went wrong."

He defended his disclosure of the American government's use of surveillance programmes to spy on its own people.

"I may have lost my ability to travel," Snowden said. "But I've gained the ability to go to sleep at night and to put my head on the pillow and feel comfortable that I've done the right thing even when it was the hard thing. And I'm comfortable with that."

He said not a single individual had been harmed by his revelations. He had never met Putin.

Snowden met for about five hours last week with Williams at the hotel in Moscow, where Snowden is living in exile while facing U.S. felony charges.

He walked out of the NSA with tens of thousands of documents on thumb drives, documents that he says he has released to journalists.

Snowden suggested that a deal could be reached with the U.S. government for him to come home, either through a clemency, an amnesty, or an agreement to serve a short prison term.

NBC said legal sources had told them that “very preliminary” conversations have already taken place between Snowden's attorneys and the U.S. government.

Snowden said he had tried to go through channels before leaking documents to journalists, repeatedly raising objections inside the NSA, in writing, to its widespread use of surveillance.

But he said he was told, "more or less, in bureaucratic language, 'You should stop asking questions.'"

Two U.S. officials confirmed earlier yesterday that Snowden sent at least one email to the NSA's office of general counsel raising policy and legal questions.

Snowden described his training as a spy in addition to his technical work as an NSA contractor and CIA employee. U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged to NBC News that Snowden in fact had been a CIA employee, and had passed the routine psychological testing for employees.

He was an enthusiastic supporter of American foreign policy and enlisted for U.S. Army special operations training during the Iraq War.

He left the service after breaking both legs in training.

He became a disillusioned intelligence worker who said he came to believe that the government took advantage of the September 11 terror attack to overreach into the private lives of all Americans.

The interview was arranged with great secrecy, as Snowden is living in Russia at an undisclosed location under a temporary one-year amnesty from the Russian government. Williams and Snowden met at the upscale Hotel Baltschug Kempinski in central Moscow, near the Kremlin. Snowden was joined there by the first two journalists he reached out to, Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Snowden received no compensation for the interview, and no topics were off limits. He said he agreed to sit down with NBC because it has published several reports based on the documents he disclosed.

"You guys had done -- actual individual reporting on these issues. You broke some of the stories. And they were about controversial issues. So, while I don't know how this is going to show up on TV, I thought it was reasonable that, you know, you guys might give this a fair shake."

Williams said Snowden with a stubbled chin and broken spectacles appeared to be both confident and careful. He avoided the hotel lobby, came up a back stairway, and showed up at Williams' door by himself with a backpack over his shoulder.

He held out his hand and said, "Hi, I'm Ed."

Williams said, "I'd been told he was demonstrably smart in person, and he seems to be just that. He speaks with precision -- and while he admittedly has had months to prepare for this interview and has his own set of talking points, he spoke in a steady cadence, interrupted by an occasional long pause, after which he would often apologize while he gathered his thoughts."

"We are not here to judge whether Edward Snowden deserves life in prison, or clemency," Williams told the NBC audience.

"We are here to listen for the first time to why he did what he did, what his concerns were for our society. We are here to learn some of the things our government did in our name. In the end, perhaps some of us will change our minds. If we don't, at least we will have been informed."at it would be "going too far" for Snowden to receive no punishment, but that the government would discuss a plea deal.

Earlier on TV US secretary of state John Kerry said Snowden should “man up” and return to the United States.

Kerry said that if Snowden were a “patriot”, he would return to the United States from Russia to face criminal charges. Snowden was charged last June with three felonies under the 1917 Espionage Act.

“This is a man who has betrayed his country,” Kerry told CBS News. “He should man up and come back to the US.”

But Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a legal adviser to Snowden, said the whistleblower hoped to return to the United States one day, but that he could not do so under the current Espionage Act charges, which make it impossible for him to argue that his disclosures had served the common good.

“The laws under which Snowden is charged don’t distinguish between sharing information with the press in the public interest, and selling secrets to a foreign enemy,” Wizner said.

“The laws would not provide him any opportunity to say that the information never should have been withheld from the public in the first place. “

Snowden’s disclosures had led to the highest journalism rewards and to historic reforms in the US and around the world.

“All of that would be irrelevant in a prosecution under the espionage laws in the United States,” said Wizner.