NEW YORK -- "60 Minutes" veteran correspondent Mike Wallace may have retired last March but that didn't stop him from scoring an exclusive interview Tuesday with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

And that fact wasn't lost on the controversial Iranian president, who halfway through the interview asked Wallace: "I thought you had retired."

Wallace's interview will appear on the "CBS Evening News" on Thursday night and on Sunday's "60 Minutes."

The 88-year-old Wallace, who has interviewed almost every notable person in his nearly 40 years on "60 Minutes," said Wednesday that he wasn't going to let a little matter such as retirement stop him from doing a story about one of the biggest gets these days. After getting word two weeks ago from CBS's liason in Tehran, Sia Zand, that Ahmadinejad would be willing to talk, Wallace hopped a plane to Paris and then Tehran with producer Bob Anderson and associate producer Casey Morgan.

But when they got there they were told that the Iranian president was very busy and may not get to talk to them. The CBS crew cooled their heels, so to speak, in Tehran's 100-degree heat in a hotel without air conditioning.

"We waited, and they said, 'he's still busy, he doesn't know, he hasn't decided,'" Wallace said. "We were scheduled to return. If he hadn't talked to us by late Tuesday we were going to get on the plane. All of the sudden word came through he was going to talk."

The 3:30 p.m. interview didn't come off until 5 p.m., but Wallace said their talk stretched for an hour and a half. "We went on and on," Wallace said. "We were told we were going to get 30 minutes."

Wallace has spent a lot of time in Iran over the past four decades, interviewing the Shah, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani and, most famously, the 1979 sitdown with the Ayatollah Khomeini who asked the Iranian leader what he thought of Anwar Sadat's desciption of him as a lunatic.

There wasn't any of that this time. Wallace dismissed the common perceptions of Ahmadinejad.

"He's actually, in a strange way, he's a rather attractive man, very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way," Wallace said. "He's very, very short but he's comfortable in his own skin."

Despite problems with translation -- there was only one translator for a time during the interview -- Wallace said Ahmadinejad was patient.

"He couldn't have been more accomodating. He had a good time doing the interview," Wallace said. And he believes that it was Ahmadinejad's idea to do the interview. He acknowledged that he had become a much-desired interview subject but told the veteran CBS journalist that he remembered a discussion the two had over a year ago when Ahmadinejad was in New York.

"I don't know if you remember this or not but you and I had a talk over breakfast at the United Nations," Ahmadinejad told Wallace. "Do you remember that you asked me at the time if I would sit down with you ... and I said by all means, let's do it." Wallace said he was surprised that Ahmadinejad had remembered.

As for retiring, Wallace said that he isn't having a happy retirement because he likes the job. He does acknowledge, particularly in this last voyage, that the airplane travel is "interminable" and the major reason why he wanted to retire in the first place. But he said there were other stories that he wanted to do.

"When you love what you do, it's not work," Wallace said.