It took time for him to be accepted because essentially, he'd never worked for CIA. He was looked on as a kind of Capitol Hill bureaucrat.

I am prepared to answer questions identifying the source who released me from my pledge of confidentiality.

It's almost an umbilical cord. And that's helped strengthen what the agency's done.

A key component of President Bush's claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program -- its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger -- was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former government official.

If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance

They looked sluggish at times and we took advantage of that. And a lot of that had to do with the pressure we created at the right times.