

File: Secretary of State John Kerry (EPA/Mario Guzman)

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called for fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to "man up" and return to the U.S. 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."