60 Minutes (1968) s46e20 Episode Script
Season 46, Episode 20
Russia has been showing the world glistening scenes of the Winter Olympics.
It's a rare opportunity to brighten a national image that often skates on the thin ice of corruption.
One authority estimates that 20 percent of the Russian economy is skimmed by graft and a lot of that by government officials.
It may be that no one knows more about this than American-born businessman Bill Browder.
Browder tells a story of thievery, vengeance and death worthy of a Russian novel.
He's a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin and he has torn a rift between Moscow and Washington.
When you hear what he has to say about Russia you'll know why Russia thinks of Bill Browder as an enemy of the state.
Bill Browder: The Russian regime is a criminal regime.
We're dealing with a nuclear country run by a bunch of Mafia crooks.
And we have to know that.
Bill Browder wanted us to know he's dedicated his life and his wealth to putting certain Russian officials in prison.
In Russia, there's a warrant out for Browder's arrest, but that is not what worries him.
Scott Pelley: You think your life's in danger? Bill Browder: My life is definitely in danger Scott Pelley: Why do you say that? Bill Browder: We've gotten numerous death threats by text, by email.
Scott Pelley: What do the texts say? Bill Browder: Things like, "What's worse, prison or death?" Those weren't the two options Browder imagined he would face back in 1996 when he first landed in Moscow.
The new Russia was then a vast opportunity where business invested its money and Russians invested their hopes.
The government was selling off relics of communism, big state-owned companies that were inefficient and corruptly managed.
Browder invested in those companies and pushed to throw out the crooked management.
Scott Pelley: How did it make sense to you to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies if you knew that the management was stealing from the bottom line? Bill Browder: We said to ourselves if we can own them cheap on a profit after stealing basis and we can stop the stealing then they'll be even cheaper and therefore we can make a lot of money.
Scott Pelley: Stopping the stealing was a way of padding your bottom line? Bill Browder: I had the best job in the world which was making money and doing good at the same time.
There's very few jobs that you can actually do that in.
In those days billionaires were grabbing companies.
Rules were loose and lines were crossed but it was a world that Browder navigated well.
He earned a reputation as a tough negotiator with sharp elbows when he needed them.
He made enemies and a spectacular fortune.
Bill Browder: By the top of my career, we were the largest investment fund in Russia with more than $4.
5 billion invested in the country.
If you had put your money in and then took it out when I left Russia you would've made 35 times your money investing in the fund.
It was lucrative and dangerous.
Hundreds of billions of dollars were sloshing around in what was essentially a new country where neither the government nor the courts had come of age.
Browder says he learned what that could mean in 2005.
After a flight from London back to Moscow, his charmed life was suddenly crushed under the stamp of a passport inspector.
Bill Browder: I was stopped at the airport detention center for about 15 hours and then they deported me from Russia and declared me a threat to national security.
Scott Pelley: What was dawning on you as you sat in that detention area? Bill Browder: I could only think this was somehow, this must be a mistake because I couldn't have imagined at that point, that I didn't think that I'd gone against the government.
I thought I was going against some crooked guys.
According to Browder, it turned out there were some crooked guys in the Russian tax service-their version of the IRS.
Nineteen months after Browder was deported a squad of police raided his office and the offices of his lawyer.
The police left with the ownership documents for the companies.
Those documents were then used to reincorporate his companies under new owners.
Browder says it's part of a scheme by an organized crime group consisting of tax service bureaucrats, police, bankers and lawyers.
Scott Pelley: Wait a minute.
The ownership of your company was transferred to someone else without your knowledge or participation? Bill Browder: Exactly.
Scott Pelley: The company was stolen? Bill Browder: Our company, our three companies were stolen using the documents seized by the police.
Then, Browder says, the new, phony owners applied to the Russian tax service for a refund that wasn't due.
Bill Browder: They basically took our companies and then applied illegally for a $230 million tax refund which was approved in one day on Christmas Eve 2007.
Scott Pelley: Merry Christmas.
Bill Browder: Merry Christmas.
It was the largest tax refund in Russian history approved in one day, no questions asked.
Scott Pelley: How does that happen? Bill Browder: We weren't sure.
We thought there, this certainly must be a rogue operation with high level people involved because to get a tax refund of $230 million, it involves a minister level person to approve it.
Bill Browder says he needed an honest man to investigate and found him in Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow tax attorney who colleagues said had never lost a case.
Bill Browder: Sergei was the kind of person that everybody should want to have in their life.
He was a man of principle, a man of competence and a true friend and a true person.
Magnitsky was one of those who had invested his hopes in the new Russia.
He'd married his high school sweetheart and they were raising two boys.
Bill Browder: He believed in the new Russia.
He was the new Russia.
Scott Pelley: Magnitsky believed in the rule of law? Bill Browder: He believed in the rule of law and he thought the law would protect him.
Magnitsky went to work, unraveled the theft and identified suspects.
One of them, he believed, was a lieutenant colonel with the police, Artem Kuznetsov, the man who led the raid on Browder's office.
Magnitsky took his evidence to prosecutors, testified and demanded an investigation.
He got one.
But not the one he expected.
In an extraordinary turn of events, the police raided Magnitsky's apartment--his arrest warrant had been ordered by the same Artem Kuznetsov.
Scott Pelley: Tell me about the moment he was arrested.
What did the police officers tell you? Magnitsky's wife, Natalia, says that he was arrested for tax evasion.
Natalia Zharikova: They didn't tell me anything.
Sergei tried to calm me down.
He said to me, "I will be back tomorrow.
" And we expected that he would be back, the next day or the day after that.
And he was in prison for about a year.
Bill Browder: They put him in pretrial detention and then they began to torture him to get him to withdraw his testimony.
Scott Pelley: What do you mean torture him? Bill Browder: They put him in cells with no windows and no heat in December in Moscow so he nearly froze to death.
They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up.
And after about six months of this his health started to really break down.
Instead of being hospitalized, Magnitsky was transferred to Butyrka, a jail with limited medical facilities.
He wrote hundreds of complaints and there's even a prison record of a beating that the guards gave him.
In all, he was held for nearly a year without trial.
Bill Browder: He and his lawyer desperately applied in writing on 20 different occasions for medical attention.
All of his requests were either ignored or rejected.
This is Magnitsky, in the light jacket, in the prison in 2009.
He was being transferred to a medical facility.
He was 37 years old and would be dead in a few hours.
Prison officials called it a heart attack.
Magnitsky's hands and wrists tell a story which is less clear.
His mother, Natalia, wanted an independent autopsy which the government denied.
Read the Council of Europe report, "Refusing impunity for the killers of Sergei Magnitsky" Natalia Magnitskaya: In the photos we saw deep, deep wounds; suggesting that violent force was used against him.
And that he was defending himself or they were pulling him by his arms, because those kinds of marks couldn't be just from wearing handcuffs.
Magnitsky's death was something of a sensation.
To citizens weary of corruption he was a martyr.
In America, Browder brought Magnitsky's mother, wife and son to Capitol Hill.
John McCain: Nice to see you again my friend.
Browder told his version of Magnitsky's death to Congress and in 2012 convinced members of the Senate and House to pass the Magnitsky Act.
Bill Browder testimony: We'll never be able to bring Sergei back The act bans 18 Russians from entering the U.
S.
including Artem Kuznetsov and other police and tax officials allegedly involved in the theft of Brower's companies.
Days later, in retaliation, the Russian parliament banned American adoption of Russian children.
U.
S.
/Russian relations haven't been the same since.
In a news conference, Vladimir Putin, who has run Russia for 14 years, insisted Magnitsky's heart had failed.
And he added, "Do you think no one dies in American jails.
Of course they do.
So what?" Scott Pelley: How did you hear of his death? Bill Browder: It was November 17th, 2009.
I got a phone call from our Russian lawyer.
And it was by far the most unexpected and horrible news that I could ever have gotten.
It was like a knife being plunged right into my heart when I got that call.
That was a knife that Russian authorities would twist.
Last year, prosecutors put Magnitsky and Browder on trial.
Empty benches sat in the court as the defendants, one deported the other dead, were tried for tax evasion.
Scott Pelley: Why should we believe it isn't true? Look, you went to business there in the gun-slinging days of the early period after the fall of the Berlin Wall when everything was possible.
And you went in there and you made spectacular amounts of money.
Now the Russians say one of the ways you did that was by beating Russian taxes.
Bill Browder: Well, one possibly could believe that if you didn't look at the circumstances of events.
If the person who organized the criminal cases against us was the person who stole $230 million and then we exposed, then they killed my lawyer and now they're putting him on trial.
It kind of destroys the credibility of any allegations they make.
Bill Browder has turned part of his London office over to his own group of investigators who have followed the money from the theft.
Bill Browder: This tells you who's in the organized crime group The results of the investigation are on his website.
His evidence includes titles for $81,000 cars owned by police officers.
And deeds for three vacation homes and a mansion owned by a midlevel tax service bureaucrat.
Scott Pelley: And the estimated value of that house is what? Bill Browder: $20 million.
Scott Pelley: Twenty million? Bill Browder: Twenty million.
And just to remind you these are people on a joint family income on $38,000 a year.
I can even show you their tax return.
Scott Pelley: Where do you get all this stuff? How is it that you have their tax return? Bill Browder: In this particular case we were approached by a Russian whistleblower, a guy who decided that, you know, murder was beyond what he was comfortable being involved with.
Scott Pelley: What's happened to these people now that you've exposed them? Bill Browder: A number of them received state honors.
They're still valued people no matter what anyone says about them abroad.
Scott Pelley: What does that tell you? Bill Browder: That tells me that this goes right up to the president of Russia.
Scott Pelley: Why do you say so? Bill Browder: Because the president of Russia has basically gone on record and he's denied that there was any crime that was committed by any official.
He's on the record saying Sergei Magnitsky was a crook and he's gone on the record saying that I'm a crook, he's clearly involved in the cover up.
Putin denies Browder's allegations.
Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov did not respond to our calls but a lawyer has denied wrongdoing on his behalf.
Just last summer, the Moscow court convicted the two empty benches and issued a warrant for Bill Browder's arrest.
Bill Browder: What they didn't anticipate was that after Sergei died that I would make it my life's work to make sure that this information saw the light of day and the people who killed Sergei didn't get away with it.
Scott Pelley: Your life's work? Why? Bill Browder: Sergei worked for me.
They arrested him for working for me.
They tortured him for working for me.
And they killed him, basically killed him as my proxy.
And I owe him, his memory and his family justice.
In the latest development, the U.
S.
Department of Justice has filed suit against 11 companies alleging that they used Manhattan real estate transactions to launder some of the money stolen from the Russian treasury through that tax refund.
The Putin administration acknowledged last December that a lack of confidence in Russian justice is causing many investors to take their money out of the country.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the Pentagon's newest warplane and its most expensive weapons system ever -- nearly $400 billion to buy that's about twice as much as it cost to put a man on the moon -- this at a time when the White House and Congress are fighting over ways to reduce the federal deficit and cuts in defense spending are forcing the Pentagon to shrink the size of the military.
The Air Force, Navy and Marines are all counting on the F-35 to replace the war planes they're flying today.
If it performs as advertised, the F-35 will enable U.
S.
pilots to control the skies in any future conflict against the likes of China or Russia.
But the F-35 has not performed as advertised.
It's seven years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget, or as the man in charge of the F-35 told us, "basically the program ran itself off the rails.
" [Chris Bogdan: Good morning.
.]
Lt.
Gen.
Chris Bogdan is the man in charge of the F-35 and every morning starts with problems that have to be dealt with ASAP.
This morning it's a valve that's been installed backwards and has to be replaced.
Chris Bogdan: How long does it take? Answer: It's about a seven day operation.
Chris Bogdan: OK.
And now you know what I'm going to say next.
Answer: Yes sir.
Chris Bogdan: What am I going to say next? Answer: You're going to say, "We're not going to pay for it.
" Chris Bogdan: That's right.
We're not going to pay for it.
Chris Bogdan: Long gone is the time where we will continue to pay for mistake after mistake after mistake.
When Bogdan took over the F-35 program a year ago, it was behind schedule, over budget and relations with the plane's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, bordered on dysfunctional.
David Martin: How would you characterize the relationship between the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin? Chris Bogdan: I'm on record after being in the job for only a month standing up and saying it was the worst relationship I had seen in my acquisition career.
These planes coming off the Lockheed Martin assembly line in Fort Worth cost $115 million a piece, a price tag Bogdan has to drastically reduce if the Pentagon can ever afford to buy the 2,400 planes it wants.
Chris Bogdan: I know where every single airplane in the production line is on any given day.
You know why that's important? Because Lockheed Martin doesn't get paid their profit unless each and every airplane meets each station on time with the right quality.
David Martin: So if this plane doesn't get from that station to this station.
Chris Bogdan: On time with the right quality they're going to lose some of their fee.
You've got to perform to make your profit.
David Martin: They must love you at Lockheed Martin.
Chris Bogdan: I try and be fair, David and if they want what I call "winner's profit," they have to act like and perform like winners, and that's fair.
Although the F-35 won't begin to enter service until next year at the earliest, pilots are already conducting test flights and training missions at bases in California, Florida, Maryland, Arizona and Nevada.
It's supposed to replace virtually all of the jet fighters in the United States military.
There's one model for the Air Force, another for the Navy - designed to catapult off an aircraft carrier - and a third for the Marines which seems to defy gravity by coming to a dead stop in mid-air and landing on a dime.
David Berke: This is a fighter that has amazing capabilities in a lot of ways.
Lt.
Col.
David Berke says there's no comparison between the F-35 and today's jet fighters.
David Berke: I'm telling you, having flown those other airplanes it's not even close at how good this airplane is and what this airplane will do for us.
David Martin: We have planes that are as fast as this.
David Berke: You bet.
David Martin: And can maneuver just as sharply as this one.
David Berke: Sure.
David Martin: So why isn't that good enough? David Berke: Those are metrics of a bygone era.
Those are ways to validate or value an airplane that just don't apply anymore.
You can see from its angled lines, the F-35 is a stealth aircraft designed to evade enemy radars.
What you can't see is the 24 million lines of software code which turn it into a flying computer.
That's what makes this plane such a big deal.
David Berke: The biggest big deal is the information this airplane gathers and processes and gives to me as the pilot.
It's very difficult to overstate how significant of an advancement this airplane is over anything that's flying right now.
Without the F-35, says Air Force Chief General Mark Welsh, the U.
S.
could lose its ability to control the air in future conflicts.
Mark Welsh: Air superiority is not a given, David.
It never has been.
And if we can't provide it everything we do on the ground and at sea will have to change.
Today's enemies - al Qaeda and the Taliban - pose no threat to American jets.
But Welsh is worried about more powerful rivals.
Mark Welsh: We're not the only ones who understand that going to this next generation of capability in a fighter aircraft is critical to survive in the future of battle space and so others are going, notably now the Chinese, the Russians and we'll see more of that in the future.
And this is what the competition looks like - the Russian T-50 and China's J-20 Stealth Fighter.
According to Welsh, they are more than a match for today's fighters.
Mark Welsh: If you take any older fighter like our existing aircraft and you put it nose to nose in, in a contested environment with a newer fighter, it will die.
David Martin: And it will die because? Mark Welsh: It will die before it even knows it's even in a fight.
In aerial combat, the plane that shoots first wins, so it all comes down to detecting the enemy before he detects you.
The F-35's combination of information technology and stealth would give American pilots what Marine Lt.
Gen.
Robert Schmidle describes as an astounding advantage in combat.
Robert Schmidle: I shouldn't get into the exact ranges because those ranges are classified, but what I can tell you is that the range at which you can detect the enemy as opposed to when he can detect you can be as much as he'll ever see you and down to five times David Martin: I want to nail that down here.
If the F-35 was going up against another stealth aircraft of the kind that other countries are working on today, it would be able still to detect that aircraft at five to 10 times the range? Robert Schmidle: You would be safe in assuming that you could detect that airplane at considerably longer distances than that airplane could detect you.
The F-35's radars, cameras and antennas would scan for 360 degrees around the plane searching for threats and projecting, for example, the altitude and speed of an enemy aircraft, onto the visor of a helmet custom-fitted to each pilot's head.
It is so top-secret no one without a security clearance has ever been allowed to see what it can do [Alan Norman: If you want to head up to my office, come on up.
.]
until Lockheed Martin's chief F-35 test pilot Alan Norman took us into the cockpit for a first-hand look.
Alan Norman: So, if you put that over your face .
.
.
That blindfold is to make sure I can see only what cameras located in different parts of the plane project onto the visor.
Alan Norman: You're looking through the eyeballs of airplane right now.
And you can even look down below the airplane.
So you're looking actually through the structure of the airplane right now.
We've positioned 60 Minutes cameraman Tom Rapier underneath the plane so we can test the system.
David Martin: So now I look and there's Tom Rapier and he's giving me one finger up.
Alan Norman: You're the only person in the world that can see him with that imagery right now.
We're not allowed to show you what's on the visor because much of it is still classified.
But wherever I turn my head, I can see what's out there.
Chris Bogdan: So there's a lot riding on that helmet, David, there's no doubt.
David Martin: How much does it cost? Chris Bogdan: The helmet itself plus the computer system that is used to make the helmet work is more than a half million dollars.
But there have been problems with the helmet and when we visited the Marine Corps station in Yuma, Ariz.
, a malfunction caused a scheduled flight to be scrubbed.
In fact, on any given day more than half the F-35s on the flight line are liable to be down for maintenance or repairs.
Bugs and glitches in the plane first reveal themselves in testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California where every test flight is monitored and recorded as if it were a space flight.
The plane has to go through 56,000 separate tests - everything from making sure a bomb will fall out of the bomb bay to seeing what happens when it is dropped at supersonic speeds.
[Rod Cregier: Of course you never like to lose an aircraft.
.]
Col.
Rod Cregier runs the test program.
Rod Cregier: You're taking an aircraft that's unknown and you're trying to determine does it do what we paid the contractor to make it do.
Does it go to the altitudes, the air speeds? Can it drop the right weapons? We're trying to get all that stuff done before we release it for the war fighter, so that they can actually use it in combat.
David Martin: So are you basically the guy who has to deliver the bad news about the plane? Rod Cregier: Sometimes it's hard to tell folks that their baby is ugly, but you have to do it because if you don't get it done, who else is gonna do it? A number of surprisingly basic defects have been uncovered.
The F-35 was restricted from flying at night because the wingtip lights, shaped to preserve the plane's stealth contours, did not meet FAA standards.
Chris Bogdan: When you hear something like that, you just kind of want to hit your head like this and go: "Multibillion dollar airplane? Wingtip lights? Come on! And then there are the tires, which have to be tough enough to withstand a conventional landing and bouncy enough to handle a vertical landing.
David Martin: We found out that the tires were wearing out two, three, four times faster than expected.
Tires.
Chris Bogdan: Tires aren't rocket science.
We ought to be able to figure out how to do tires on a multibillion dollar highly advanced fighter.
Lt.
Gen.
Schmidle remembers the day one of the planes delivered to the Marines had gaps in its stealth coating.
Robert Schmidle: They sent me the pictures within half an hour of the thing landing and I then sent them on to Lockheed Martin and said, "So talk to me.
" David Martin: I got a feeling you said more than just "talk to me.
" Robert Schmidle: Um, (laugh).
David Martin: Did you say, "What the hell?" Robert Schmidle: You know Marines tend to be relatively direct in the way that we try to help people understand what our, what our particular concerns are.
Executives at Lockheed Martin declined our request for an interview and instead sent us this email saying, in part: "We recognize the program has had developmental and cost challenges and we are working with our customers, partners and suppliers to address these challenges.
" That stealth coating was repaired and the problem with the running lights fixed but, so far, not the tires.
With about 35 planes a year coming off the Lockheed Martin assembly line, it seems awfully late to be discovering such basic flaws.
That's because early in the program the Pentagon counted on computer modeling and simulators to take the place of old-fashioned flight testing.
Frank Kendall: An old adage in the, in this business is, "You should fly before you buy.
" Make sure the design is stable and things work before you actually go into production.
Frank Kendall is the under secretary of Defense for Acquisition - the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer.
Frank Kendall: We started buying airplanes a good year before we started flight tests.
David Martin: So you buy before you fly? Frank Kendall: In that case yes.
David Martin: Just saying, it doesn't sound like a good idea.
Frank Kendall: I referred to that decision as acquisition malpractice.
This May 2010 Pentagon memo detailed the "flawedassumptions," "unrealisticestimates" and "a general reluctance to accept unfavorable information" that put the program seven years behind schedule and more than $160 billion over budget.
To stop the bleeding, Kendall pumped an extra $4.
6 billion into flight testing and froze production.
Frank Kendall: We need to face the truth in this business.
We need to understand what works and what doesn't.
David Martin: Is this F-35 program now under control? Frank Kendall: Yes, it is.
Shortly after he spoke with us, Kendall issued this memo stating "progress is sufficient" to increase production next year.
But, he warned, the plane's software "is behind schedule" and "reliabilityis not growing at an acceptable rate.
" Still, the Pentagon plans to buy as many as David Martin: Has the F-35 program passed the point of no return? Chris Bogdan: I don't see any scenario where we're walking back away from this program.
David Martin: So the American taxpayer is going to buy this airplane? Chris Bogdan: I would tell you we're going to buy a lot of these airplanes.
The Oscars are just two weeks from now and a lot of people think Cate Blanchett has a lock on winning best actress for her leading role in Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine.
" Blanchet grew up in Australia where she started her career in the theater.
She's a movie star who does Shakespeare.
She's first and foremost a theater actor, winning wild praise for her Hedda Gabler and Blanche Dubois on the stage.
This doesn't mean she can't take a jokeor a fun role in blockbusters like Indiana Jones.
It seems she can do it all, Playing Americans, Russians, Germans, skinheads, albinos and men! Vanity Fair called her "a character actress in a leading woman's body.
" Lesley Stahl: So you've played the queen of England, you've played an elf, you played an Italian immigrant-- Cate Blanchett: Albino.
Lesley Stahl: Albino- Cate Blanchett: And that's just before breakfast this morning.
[Clip as albino: I have pink eyes.
Like a putano, huh? Like the devil, eh?.]
Lesley Stahl: The range is extraordinary.
Cate Blanchett: I guess I've got one of those faces that's not particularly beautiful, not too ugly, you know.
I can look-- Lesley Stahl: Come on-- Cate Blanchett: --a bit masculine, I can look a bit feminine depending on how you're lit, how you're shot.
I don't mind not looking conventionally-- you know, attractive if that's what the part requires.
So she can be gorgeous and regal as the elf queen in "Lord of the Rings.
" Not so much when she played Bob Dylan.
[Cate as Dylan: You just want me to say what you want me to say.
.]
Cate Blanchett: I don't feel like, now I'm a great actress.
I never feel that.
You always think, "OK, I've learned that.
Well, now what if I did that?" They call her a chameleon - the way she almost molts into her characters, as when she played Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator," for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress.
[Cate as Katharine Hepburn: You're not extending enough on your follow-through.
Follow-through is everything in golf, just like life.
Hahaha, don't you find?!.]
She spent weeks with a voice coach perfecting Hepburn's distinctive accent.
Lesley Stahl: Can you speak Katharine Hepburn? Cate Blanchett: No, I can't do anything.
I'm terrible.
I'm the worst dinner party guest in the world.
People say, "Oh, do-- do your Scottish," and I'll go, "Okee.
I'll do me--" I sound like I'm a cross between sort of from New Delhi, and-- Boston.
It's terrible.
In "Blue Jasmine" she plays a desperate Park Avenue socialite who loses her life of status and luxury when her husband turns out to be a swindler like Bernie Madoff.
[Clip from "Blue Jasmine": Uh, I was forced to take a job selling shoes on Madison Avenue.
Ugh, so humiliating.
Friends I'd had at dinner parties at our apartment came in and I waited on them.
I mean, do you have any idea what that's like?.]
Cate Blanchett: She was monumentally deluded.
And like a lot of us, I mean, we - we-- our lives are built on a fictionalized sense of self.
Who we would - who we aspire to be, rather than perhaps who we actually are.
Lesley Stahl: You do a lot of research.
You're known for reading, watching videos, getting- Cate Blanchett: It's enjoyable.
It's enjoyable.
Lesley Stahl: Is it true that you watched the 60 Minutes Morley Safer interview of Ruth Madoff? [Ruth Madoff on 60 Minutes: If I could change things, at least if I had tried, I would have felt a little better.
.]
Lesley Stahl: Bernie Madoff's wife-- Cate Blanchett: Yes, absolutely-- Lesley Stahl: Did that help you? Did it? Cate Blanchett: It did.
I think that what I really got from them, that Madoff interview, was the sense of shame.
And I found that very useful.
One critic called it "the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career.
" Clip from "Blue Jasmine": You know, someday when you come into great wealth, you must remember to be generous.
But for Blanchett, Woody Allen's notoriously minimal direction was unnerving.
Lesley Stahl: You really love to talk things out.
And as I understand it, that's not his style.
Cate Blanchett: No.
He's monosyllabic at best.
I don't know how to do this thing unless it's in conversation with somebody else.
I can't-monologue is - terrifies me.
Lesley Stahl: But that's what you got.
Cate Blanchett: First day he said, "It's awful.
You're awful.
" Lesley Stahl: To you? Cate Blanchett: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: He said "awful"? Cate Blanchett: "It's awful.
" Lesley Stahl: But he didn't say what to do? He just said, "It's awful"? Cate Blanchett: No.
No.
Lesley Stahl: So then you did it again-- Cate Blanchett: And it was still awful.
But -- Lesley Stahl: It was still awful? Cate Blanchett: Well, obviously, it got a bit better because it didn't-- you know, people have gone to see it.
Her breakthrough role came in 1998 as the queen of England in "Elizabeth.
" [Cate in "Elizabeth": I am married to England.
.]
After that performance, she was offered other big parts, but went for characters who stretched her, rather than ones that would make her famous.
Even though she's often on the red carpet these days, Blanchett never sought to be a movie star, nor did she think she'd ever be one.
She's the middle child of a school teacher mother and transplanted Texan father, who died when she was 10.
She dropped out of college to study theater.
What she wanted was to be was a great stage actress and got her first major role in a play here at the Sydney Theater Company.
Cate Blanchett: There's a photo over here-- In 1993, she co-starred with fellow Aussie Geoffrey Rush in David Mamet's "Oleanna.
" Lesley Stahl: Look how into it you are.
You are so inside.
Cate Blanchett: It was one of those plays.
["Oleanna" clip, Australian TV - Cate: You can look at yourself and you can see those things that I see.
And you can find revulsion equal to my own.
Good day!.]
Lesley Stahl: You were a triumph in it.
People were dazzled.
Cate Blanchett: Yeah, the director actually almost sacked me.
And that was probably a big motivator for me to do a better job-- Lesley Stahl: Are you one of those people-- are you one of those people that-- Cate Blanchett: Likes to be terrified.
Lesley Stahl: Likes to be terrified? Cate Blanchett: I think it's the only way to work for me-- Lesley Stahl: It motivates you? Cate Blanchett: Yeah.
I'm much better with truth.
Lesley Stahl: Even if it hurts? Cate Blanchett: Even if it hurts.
Lesley Stahl: Well, I think you've talked about the whole process as the trapeze effect.
You're flying up there, and you could fall.
Cate Blanchett: Yes-- Lesley Stahl: It's fear.
Cate Blanchett: When you're stretching yourself, as a role like "Blue Jasmine" did for me, you risk falling flat on your face.
She applies that same risk-taking to her personal life, like when she and Andrew Upton, a playwright and director, decided to get married on a whim.
They were both part of the Sydney Theater crowd.
Lesley Stahl: How did you meet? How did the sparks start? Andrew Upton: The sparks started slowly, I think, personally.
Cate Blanchett: We didn't like each other.
Andrew Upton: We didn't get on at all at first sight-- Lesley Stahl: Really? Cate Blanchett: And then all of a sudden, we played poker one night and you were telling me about how you were in love with a friend of mine, and then we kissed.
Lesley Stahl: And, all of a sudden, you're asking her to marry you, real fast as I understand it.
Andrew Upton: I think it was about 21 days.
Lesley Stahl: And you said yes right away? Three weeks? Cate Blanchett: Yeah.
You leap off at the same time.
And I think it's all about timing.
She says their marriage is a partnership in the raising of their three sons, ages 5, 9 and 12 and in their careers.
Upton has been her collaborator and sounding board.
And they share a love of their country.
She's Australian through and through, down-to-earth and happy to be 18 time zones away from Hollywood.
Cate Blanchett: I adore Australia.
I mean, I live and work here.
And I'm buoyed up by it.
I'm inspired by it.
As she took us for a walk along the Sydney coast, she talked about her private life.
Except for her husband, the only member of the family we'd be allowed to film would be the dog Fletcher.
Her home and her children were off limits.
In the late 90s, she and Upton moved to England and her movie career took off.
But in 2006, the Sydney Theater Company invited them to come back and take over as co-artistic directors and they jumped at it.
Cate Blanchett: It was one of the quickest decisions I think we made once the offer had come our way, apart from how quickly we got married.
Maybe in the same spirit, strangely.
Andrew Upton: Yeah, I think it was in the same spirit of adventure.
It's a job they shared for six years.
It kept Cate in Sydney, allowing her to spend more time with their children, and to return to her first love, theater.
Lesley Stahl: So this is wardrobe.
While she acted in some of the productions, she also became an administrator, overseeing things like wardrobe and props.
She and Upton hired big name directors - and brought the company international acclaim with ambitious productions like "Streetcar Named Desire," which they took to New York in 2009, with Cate as Blanche Dubois.
Lesley Stahl: It is so intense.
It was so intense.
How long does it take you to come down from an experience on the stage like that? Cate Blanchett: At the time you just -- you do eight shows a week, my hair was falling out by the end, and I mean- Lesley Stahl: Your-- is that true? Cate Blanchett: Yeah.
It was not-- Lesley Stahl: Your hair was falling out 'cause you put so much into it-- Cate Blanchett: But I think I was just so exhausted by, by it.
She's known for being low maintenance, her drama's strictly onscreen or on stage.
When we met her before a performance of Uncle Vanya, she was doing her own makeup.
[Clip from Uncle Vanya: Your life should not be to grumble and moan.
.]
Well, what's she like after a performance? Lesley Stahl: Does she stay in the role? Andrew Upton: No.
Lesley Stahl: She comes home and she's still Blanche DuBois that night-- Cate Blanchett: Don't answer that, Andrew.
Lesley Stahl: She comes home and she's Cate? Andrew Upton: Yeah-- Lesley Stahl: After these emotional, powerful-- Andrew Upton:: Yeah.
Quite calm and chirpy.
She says she's not a "method" actor who "mines" her inner-self to unlock a character.
Cate Blanchett: It has nothing to do with me and the fact that my dog died or my father died with my-- when I was 10, and making the grief small and personal and inward.
And so therefore you don't carry it home because you're not going through some personal, inward self-analysis every night that could eat you away.
You're giving it away to the audience and hopefully, if it works, then, it's their-- they have-- it's their problem-- Lesley Stahl: They take it in.
Well, yeah-- Cate Blanchett: They can take it home.
In December, Cate decided to leave the Sydney Theater Company and a job she loved.
Lesley Stahl: What went into that decision? Cate Blanchett: The children.
You could feel their school needs beginning to grow.
They actually need that attention and, at a certain point, you have to make a decision about that, and that's not something we want to outsource.
Now her decisions about what roles to take in movies include how long she'd have to be away from home or whether she can take the boys with her on location, as she did with "Blue Jasmine" - her comeback to the movies, which she has done with a roar.
Lesley Stahl: You're 44 years old.
Cate Blanchett: Am I? We don't need to discuss that.
Lesley Stahl: Yeah, you are- Cate Blanchett: We don't need to rub that in.
Let's not-- Lesley Stahl: I'm not rubbing it in.
I think it's great to be 44, frankly.
But it can be a tough age for an actress.
At least, that's the myth, I guess.
Because for you, it's been a fabulous age.
Cate Blanchett: Well, I came to the film industry- I mean, in actress years, I was pushing 80.
Because I was in my mid-20s when I made my first film.
Now her movie career is so hot, she's already signed up for seven films.
She's booked solid through at least 2015.
Lesley Stahl: What is the hardest part of your job? The thing you struggle with the most? Cate Blanchett: Oh, look.
Is it hard? I don't know that it's hard.
I'm an actress.
I think the most complicated thing - it's the military maneuver of getting two careers, three children, but that's a working mother's problem, working parents' problem - that's not the challenge of work.
I think in relation to the work, the trickiest thing is beginning.
I think it's quite a tricky neuro-linguistic process actually to try and make something that another, that a character said, to make it come out through your body and make it seem like that's natural.
It's kind of tricking yourself; the confidence trick.
Like an athlete does, you have to just say: "I'm just going to start.
I'm ready.
I'm open.
Let's go.
"
It's a rare opportunity to brighten a national image that often skates on the thin ice of corruption.
One authority estimates that 20 percent of the Russian economy is skimmed by graft and a lot of that by government officials.
It may be that no one knows more about this than American-born businessman Bill Browder.
Browder tells a story of thievery, vengeance and death worthy of a Russian novel.
He's a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin and he has torn a rift between Moscow and Washington.
When you hear what he has to say about Russia you'll know why Russia thinks of Bill Browder as an enemy of the state.
Bill Browder: The Russian regime is a criminal regime.
We're dealing with a nuclear country run by a bunch of Mafia crooks.
And we have to know that.
Bill Browder wanted us to know he's dedicated his life and his wealth to putting certain Russian officials in prison.
In Russia, there's a warrant out for Browder's arrest, but that is not what worries him.
Scott Pelley: You think your life's in danger? Bill Browder: My life is definitely in danger Scott Pelley: Why do you say that? Bill Browder: We've gotten numerous death threats by text, by email.
Scott Pelley: What do the texts say? Bill Browder: Things like, "What's worse, prison or death?" Those weren't the two options Browder imagined he would face back in 1996 when he first landed in Moscow.
The new Russia was then a vast opportunity where business invested its money and Russians invested their hopes.
The government was selling off relics of communism, big state-owned companies that were inefficient and corruptly managed.
Browder invested in those companies and pushed to throw out the crooked management.
Scott Pelley: How did it make sense to you to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies if you knew that the management was stealing from the bottom line? Bill Browder: We said to ourselves if we can own them cheap on a profit after stealing basis and we can stop the stealing then they'll be even cheaper and therefore we can make a lot of money.
Scott Pelley: Stopping the stealing was a way of padding your bottom line? Bill Browder: I had the best job in the world which was making money and doing good at the same time.
There's very few jobs that you can actually do that in.
In those days billionaires were grabbing companies.
Rules were loose and lines were crossed but it was a world that Browder navigated well.
He earned a reputation as a tough negotiator with sharp elbows when he needed them.
He made enemies and a spectacular fortune.
Bill Browder: By the top of my career, we were the largest investment fund in Russia with more than $4.
5 billion invested in the country.
If you had put your money in and then took it out when I left Russia you would've made 35 times your money investing in the fund.
It was lucrative and dangerous.
Hundreds of billions of dollars were sloshing around in what was essentially a new country where neither the government nor the courts had come of age.
Browder says he learned what that could mean in 2005.
After a flight from London back to Moscow, his charmed life was suddenly crushed under the stamp of a passport inspector.
Bill Browder: I was stopped at the airport detention center for about 15 hours and then they deported me from Russia and declared me a threat to national security.
Scott Pelley: What was dawning on you as you sat in that detention area? Bill Browder: I could only think this was somehow, this must be a mistake because I couldn't have imagined at that point, that I didn't think that I'd gone against the government.
I thought I was going against some crooked guys.
According to Browder, it turned out there were some crooked guys in the Russian tax service-their version of the IRS.
Nineteen months after Browder was deported a squad of police raided his office and the offices of his lawyer.
The police left with the ownership documents for the companies.
Those documents were then used to reincorporate his companies under new owners.
Browder says it's part of a scheme by an organized crime group consisting of tax service bureaucrats, police, bankers and lawyers.
Scott Pelley: Wait a minute.
The ownership of your company was transferred to someone else without your knowledge or participation? Bill Browder: Exactly.
Scott Pelley: The company was stolen? Bill Browder: Our company, our three companies were stolen using the documents seized by the police.
Then, Browder says, the new, phony owners applied to the Russian tax service for a refund that wasn't due.
Bill Browder: They basically took our companies and then applied illegally for a $230 million tax refund which was approved in one day on Christmas Eve 2007.
Scott Pelley: Merry Christmas.
Bill Browder: Merry Christmas.
It was the largest tax refund in Russian history approved in one day, no questions asked.
Scott Pelley: How does that happen? Bill Browder: We weren't sure.
We thought there, this certainly must be a rogue operation with high level people involved because to get a tax refund of $230 million, it involves a minister level person to approve it.
Bill Browder says he needed an honest man to investigate and found him in Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow tax attorney who colleagues said had never lost a case.
Bill Browder: Sergei was the kind of person that everybody should want to have in their life.
He was a man of principle, a man of competence and a true friend and a true person.
Magnitsky was one of those who had invested his hopes in the new Russia.
He'd married his high school sweetheart and they were raising two boys.
Bill Browder: He believed in the new Russia.
He was the new Russia.
Scott Pelley: Magnitsky believed in the rule of law? Bill Browder: He believed in the rule of law and he thought the law would protect him.
Magnitsky went to work, unraveled the theft and identified suspects.
One of them, he believed, was a lieutenant colonel with the police, Artem Kuznetsov, the man who led the raid on Browder's office.
Magnitsky took his evidence to prosecutors, testified and demanded an investigation.
He got one.
But not the one he expected.
In an extraordinary turn of events, the police raided Magnitsky's apartment--his arrest warrant had been ordered by the same Artem Kuznetsov.
Scott Pelley: Tell me about the moment he was arrested.
What did the police officers tell you? Magnitsky's wife, Natalia, says that he was arrested for tax evasion.
Natalia Zharikova: They didn't tell me anything.
Sergei tried to calm me down.
He said to me, "I will be back tomorrow.
" And we expected that he would be back, the next day or the day after that.
And he was in prison for about a year.
Bill Browder: They put him in pretrial detention and then they began to torture him to get him to withdraw his testimony.
Scott Pelley: What do you mean torture him? Bill Browder: They put him in cells with no windows and no heat in December in Moscow so he nearly froze to death.
They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up.
And after about six months of this his health started to really break down.
Instead of being hospitalized, Magnitsky was transferred to Butyrka, a jail with limited medical facilities.
He wrote hundreds of complaints and there's even a prison record of a beating that the guards gave him.
In all, he was held for nearly a year without trial.
Bill Browder: He and his lawyer desperately applied in writing on 20 different occasions for medical attention.
All of his requests were either ignored or rejected.
This is Magnitsky, in the light jacket, in the prison in 2009.
He was being transferred to a medical facility.
He was 37 years old and would be dead in a few hours.
Prison officials called it a heart attack.
Magnitsky's hands and wrists tell a story which is less clear.
His mother, Natalia, wanted an independent autopsy which the government denied.
Read the Council of Europe report, "Refusing impunity for the killers of Sergei Magnitsky" Natalia Magnitskaya: In the photos we saw deep, deep wounds; suggesting that violent force was used against him.
And that he was defending himself or they were pulling him by his arms, because those kinds of marks couldn't be just from wearing handcuffs.
Magnitsky's death was something of a sensation.
To citizens weary of corruption he was a martyr.
In America, Browder brought Magnitsky's mother, wife and son to Capitol Hill.
John McCain: Nice to see you again my friend.
Browder told his version of Magnitsky's death to Congress and in 2012 convinced members of the Senate and House to pass the Magnitsky Act.
Bill Browder testimony: We'll never be able to bring Sergei back The act bans 18 Russians from entering the U.
S.
including Artem Kuznetsov and other police and tax officials allegedly involved in the theft of Brower's companies.
Days later, in retaliation, the Russian parliament banned American adoption of Russian children.
U.
S.
/Russian relations haven't been the same since.
In a news conference, Vladimir Putin, who has run Russia for 14 years, insisted Magnitsky's heart had failed.
And he added, "Do you think no one dies in American jails.
Of course they do.
So what?" Scott Pelley: How did you hear of his death? Bill Browder: It was November 17th, 2009.
I got a phone call from our Russian lawyer.
And it was by far the most unexpected and horrible news that I could ever have gotten.
It was like a knife being plunged right into my heart when I got that call.
That was a knife that Russian authorities would twist.
Last year, prosecutors put Magnitsky and Browder on trial.
Empty benches sat in the court as the defendants, one deported the other dead, were tried for tax evasion.
Scott Pelley: Why should we believe it isn't true? Look, you went to business there in the gun-slinging days of the early period after the fall of the Berlin Wall when everything was possible.
And you went in there and you made spectacular amounts of money.
Now the Russians say one of the ways you did that was by beating Russian taxes.
Bill Browder: Well, one possibly could believe that if you didn't look at the circumstances of events.
If the person who organized the criminal cases against us was the person who stole $230 million and then we exposed, then they killed my lawyer and now they're putting him on trial.
It kind of destroys the credibility of any allegations they make.
Bill Browder has turned part of his London office over to his own group of investigators who have followed the money from the theft.
Bill Browder: This tells you who's in the organized crime group The results of the investigation are on his website.
His evidence includes titles for $81,000 cars owned by police officers.
And deeds for three vacation homes and a mansion owned by a midlevel tax service bureaucrat.
Scott Pelley: And the estimated value of that house is what? Bill Browder: $20 million.
Scott Pelley: Twenty million? Bill Browder: Twenty million.
And just to remind you these are people on a joint family income on $38,000 a year.
I can even show you their tax return.
Scott Pelley: Where do you get all this stuff? How is it that you have their tax return? Bill Browder: In this particular case we were approached by a Russian whistleblower, a guy who decided that, you know, murder was beyond what he was comfortable being involved with.
Scott Pelley: What's happened to these people now that you've exposed them? Bill Browder: A number of them received state honors.
They're still valued people no matter what anyone says about them abroad.
Scott Pelley: What does that tell you? Bill Browder: That tells me that this goes right up to the president of Russia.
Scott Pelley: Why do you say so? Bill Browder: Because the president of Russia has basically gone on record and he's denied that there was any crime that was committed by any official.
He's on the record saying Sergei Magnitsky was a crook and he's gone on the record saying that I'm a crook, he's clearly involved in the cover up.
Putin denies Browder's allegations.
Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov did not respond to our calls but a lawyer has denied wrongdoing on his behalf.
Just last summer, the Moscow court convicted the two empty benches and issued a warrant for Bill Browder's arrest.
Bill Browder: What they didn't anticipate was that after Sergei died that I would make it my life's work to make sure that this information saw the light of day and the people who killed Sergei didn't get away with it.
Scott Pelley: Your life's work? Why? Bill Browder: Sergei worked for me.
They arrested him for working for me.
They tortured him for working for me.
And they killed him, basically killed him as my proxy.
And I owe him, his memory and his family justice.
In the latest development, the U.
S.
Department of Justice has filed suit against 11 companies alleging that they used Manhattan real estate transactions to launder some of the money stolen from the Russian treasury through that tax refund.
The Putin administration acknowledged last December that a lack of confidence in Russian justice is causing many investors to take their money out of the country.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the Pentagon's newest warplane and its most expensive weapons system ever -- nearly $400 billion to buy that's about twice as much as it cost to put a man on the moon -- this at a time when the White House and Congress are fighting over ways to reduce the federal deficit and cuts in defense spending are forcing the Pentagon to shrink the size of the military.
The Air Force, Navy and Marines are all counting on the F-35 to replace the war planes they're flying today.
If it performs as advertised, the F-35 will enable U.
S.
pilots to control the skies in any future conflict against the likes of China or Russia.
But the F-35 has not performed as advertised.
It's seven years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget, or as the man in charge of the F-35 told us, "basically the program ran itself off the rails.
" [Chris Bogdan: Good morning.
.]
Lt.
Gen.
Chris Bogdan is the man in charge of the F-35 and every morning starts with problems that have to be dealt with ASAP.
This morning it's a valve that's been installed backwards and has to be replaced.
Chris Bogdan: How long does it take? Answer: It's about a seven day operation.
Chris Bogdan: OK.
And now you know what I'm going to say next.
Answer: Yes sir.
Chris Bogdan: What am I going to say next? Answer: You're going to say, "We're not going to pay for it.
" Chris Bogdan: That's right.
We're not going to pay for it.
Chris Bogdan: Long gone is the time where we will continue to pay for mistake after mistake after mistake.
When Bogdan took over the F-35 program a year ago, it was behind schedule, over budget and relations with the plane's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, bordered on dysfunctional.
David Martin: How would you characterize the relationship between the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin? Chris Bogdan: I'm on record after being in the job for only a month standing up and saying it was the worst relationship I had seen in my acquisition career.
These planes coming off the Lockheed Martin assembly line in Fort Worth cost $115 million a piece, a price tag Bogdan has to drastically reduce if the Pentagon can ever afford to buy the 2,400 planes it wants.
Chris Bogdan: I know where every single airplane in the production line is on any given day.
You know why that's important? Because Lockheed Martin doesn't get paid their profit unless each and every airplane meets each station on time with the right quality.
David Martin: So if this plane doesn't get from that station to this station.
Chris Bogdan: On time with the right quality they're going to lose some of their fee.
You've got to perform to make your profit.
David Martin: They must love you at Lockheed Martin.
Chris Bogdan: I try and be fair, David and if they want what I call "winner's profit," they have to act like and perform like winners, and that's fair.
Although the F-35 won't begin to enter service until next year at the earliest, pilots are already conducting test flights and training missions at bases in California, Florida, Maryland, Arizona and Nevada.
It's supposed to replace virtually all of the jet fighters in the United States military.
There's one model for the Air Force, another for the Navy - designed to catapult off an aircraft carrier - and a third for the Marines which seems to defy gravity by coming to a dead stop in mid-air and landing on a dime.
David Berke: This is a fighter that has amazing capabilities in a lot of ways.
Lt.
Col.
David Berke says there's no comparison between the F-35 and today's jet fighters.
David Berke: I'm telling you, having flown those other airplanes it's not even close at how good this airplane is and what this airplane will do for us.
David Martin: We have planes that are as fast as this.
David Berke: You bet.
David Martin: And can maneuver just as sharply as this one.
David Berke: Sure.
David Martin: So why isn't that good enough? David Berke: Those are metrics of a bygone era.
Those are ways to validate or value an airplane that just don't apply anymore.
You can see from its angled lines, the F-35 is a stealth aircraft designed to evade enemy radars.
What you can't see is the 24 million lines of software code which turn it into a flying computer.
That's what makes this plane such a big deal.
David Berke: The biggest big deal is the information this airplane gathers and processes and gives to me as the pilot.
It's very difficult to overstate how significant of an advancement this airplane is over anything that's flying right now.
Without the F-35, says Air Force Chief General Mark Welsh, the U.
S.
could lose its ability to control the air in future conflicts.
Mark Welsh: Air superiority is not a given, David.
It never has been.
And if we can't provide it everything we do on the ground and at sea will have to change.
Today's enemies - al Qaeda and the Taliban - pose no threat to American jets.
But Welsh is worried about more powerful rivals.
Mark Welsh: We're not the only ones who understand that going to this next generation of capability in a fighter aircraft is critical to survive in the future of battle space and so others are going, notably now the Chinese, the Russians and we'll see more of that in the future.
And this is what the competition looks like - the Russian T-50 and China's J-20 Stealth Fighter.
According to Welsh, they are more than a match for today's fighters.
Mark Welsh: If you take any older fighter like our existing aircraft and you put it nose to nose in, in a contested environment with a newer fighter, it will die.
David Martin: And it will die because? Mark Welsh: It will die before it even knows it's even in a fight.
In aerial combat, the plane that shoots first wins, so it all comes down to detecting the enemy before he detects you.
The F-35's combination of information technology and stealth would give American pilots what Marine Lt.
Gen.
Robert Schmidle describes as an astounding advantage in combat.
Robert Schmidle: I shouldn't get into the exact ranges because those ranges are classified, but what I can tell you is that the range at which you can detect the enemy as opposed to when he can detect you can be as much as he'll ever see you and down to five times David Martin: I want to nail that down here.
If the F-35 was going up against another stealth aircraft of the kind that other countries are working on today, it would be able still to detect that aircraft at five to 10 times the range? Robert Schmidle: You would be safe in assuming that you could detect that airplane at considerably longer distances than that airplane could detect you.
The F-35's radars, cameras and antennas would scan for 360 degrees around the plane searching for threats and projecting, for example, the altitude and speed of an enemy aircraft, onto the visor of a helmet custom-fitted to each pilot's head.
It is so top-secret no one without a security clearance has ever been allowed to see what it can do [Alan Norman: If you want to head up to my office, come on up.
.]
until Lockheed Martin's chief F-35 test pilot Alan Norman took us into the cockpit for a first-hand look.
Alan Norman: So, if you put that over your face .
.
.
That blindfold is to make sure I can see only what cameras located in different parts of the plane project onto the visor.
Alan Norman: You're looking through the eyeballs of airplane right now.
And you can even look down below the airplane.
So you're looking actually through the structure of the airplane right now.
We've positioned 60 Minutes cameraman Tom Rapier underneath the plane so we can test the system.
David Martin: So now I look and there's Tom Rapier and he's giving me one finger up.
Alan Norman: You're the only person in the world that can see him with that imagery right now.
We're not allowed to show you what's on the visor because much of it is still classified.
But wherever I turn my head, I can see what's out there.
Chris Bogdan: So there's a lot riding on that helmet, David, there's no doubt.
David Martin: How much does it cost? Chris Bogdan: The helmet itself plus the computer system that is used to make the helmet work is more than a half million dollars.
But there have been problems with the helmet and when we visited the Marine Corps station in Yuma, Ariz.
, a malfunction caused a scheduled flight to be scrubbed.
In fact, on any given day more than half the F-35s on the flight line are liable to be down for maintenance or repairs.
Bugs and glitches in the plane first reveal themselves in testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California where every test flight is monitored and recorded as if it were a space flight.
The plane has to go through 56,000 separate tests - everything from making sure a bomb will fall out of the bomb bay to seeing what happens when it is dropped at supersonic speeds.
[Rod Cregier: Of course you never like to lose an aircraft.
.]
Col.
Rod Cregier runs the test program.
Rod Cregier: You're taking an aircraft that's unknown and you're trying to determine does it do what we paid the contractor to make it do.
Does it go to the altitudes, the air speeds? Can it drop the right weapons? We're trying to get all that stuff done before we release it for the war fighter, so that they can actually use it in combat.
David Martin: So are you basically the guy who has to deliver the bad news about the plane? Rod Cregier: Sometimes it's hard to tell folks that their baby is ugly, but you have to do it because if you don't get it done, who else is gonna do it? A number of surprisingly basic defects have been uncovered.
The F-35 was restricted from flying at night because the wingtip lights, shaped to preserve the plane's stealth contours, did not meet FAA standards.
Chris Bogdan: When you hear something like that, you just kind of want to hit your head like this and go: "Multibillion dollar airplane? Wingtip lights? Come on! And then there are the tires, which have to be tough enough to withstand a conventional landing and bouncy enough to handle a vertical landing.
David Martin: We found out that the tires were wearing out two, three, four times faster than expected.
Tires.
Chris Bogdan: Tires aren't rocket science.
We ought to be able to figure out how to do tires on a multibillion dollar highly advanced fighter.
Lt.
Gen.
Schmidle remembers the day one of the planes delivered to the Marines had gaps in its stealth coating.
Robert Schmidle: They sent me the pictures within half an hour of the thing landing and I then sent them on to Lockheed Martin and said, "So talk to me.
" David Martin: I got a feeling you said more than just "talk to me.
" Robert Schmidle: Um, (laugh).
David Martin: Did you say, "What the hell?" Robert Schmidle: You know Marines tend to be relatively direct in the way that we try to help people understand what our, what our particular concerns are.
Executives at Lockheed Martin declined our request for an interview and instead sent us this email saying, in part: "We recognize the program has had developmental and cost challenges and we are working with our customers, partners and suppliers to address these challenges.
" That stealth coating was repaired and the problem with the running lights fixed but, so far, not the tires.
With about 35 planes a year coming off the Lockheed Martin assembly line, it seems awfully late to be discovering such basic flaws.
That's because early in the program the Pentagon counted on computer modeling and simulators to take the place of old-fashioned flight testing.
Frank Kendall: An old adage in the, in this business is, "You should fly before you buy.
" Make sure the design is stable and things work before you actually go into production.
Frank Kendall is the under secretary of Defense for Acquisition - the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer.
Frank Kendall: We started buying airplanes a good year before we started flight tests.
David Martin: So you buy before you fly? Frank Kendall: In that case yes.
David Martin: Just saying, it doesn't sound like a good idea.
Frank Kendall: I referred to that decision as acquisition malpractice.
This May 2010 Pentagon memo detailed the "flawedassumptions," "unrealisticestimates" and "a general reluctance to accept unfavorable information" that put the program seven years behind schedule and more than $160 billion over budget.
To stop the bleeding, Kendall pumped an extra $4.
6 billion into flight testing and froze production.
Frank Kendall: We need to face the truth in this business.
We need to understand what works and what doesn't.
David Martin: Is this F-35 program now under control? Frank Kendall: Yes, it is.
Shortly after he spoke with us, Kendall issued this memo stating "progress is sufficient" to increase production next year.
But, he warned, the plane's software "is behind schedule" and "reliabilityis not growing at an acceptable rate.
" Still, the Pentagon plans to buy as many as David Martin: Has the F-35 program passed the point of no return? Chris Bogdan: I don't see any scenario where we're walking back away from this program.
David Martin: So the American taxpayer is going to buy this airplane? Chris Bogdan: I would tell you we're going to buy a lot of these airplanes.
The Oscars are just two weeks from now and a lot of people think Cate Blanchett has a lock on winning best actress for her leading role in Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine.
" Blanchet grew up in Australia where she started her career in the theater.
She's a movie star who does Shakespeare.
She's first and foremost a theater actor, winning wild praise for her Hedda Gabler and Blanche Dubois on the stage.
This doesn't mean she can't take a jokeor a fun role in blockbusters like Indiana Jones.
It seems she can do it all, Playing Americans, Russians, Germans, skinheads, albinos and men! Vanity Fair called her "a character actress in a leading woman's body.
" Lesley Stahl: So you've played the queen of England, you've played an elf, you played an Italian immigrant-- Cate Blanchett: Albino.
Lesley Stahl: Albino- Cate Blanchett: And that's just before breakfast this morning.
[Clip as albino: I have pink eyes.
Like a putano, huh? Like the devil, eh?.]
Lesley Stahl: The range is extraordinary.
Cate Blanchett: I guess I've got one of those faces that's not particularly beautiful, not too ugly, you know.
I can look-- Lesley Stahl: Come on-- Cate Blanchett: --a bit masculine, I can look a bit feminine depending on how you're lit, how you're shot.
I don't mind not looking conventionally-- you know, attractive if that's what the part requires.
So she can be gorgeous and regal as the elf queen in "Lord of the Rings.
" Not so much when she played Bob Dylan.
[Cate as Dylan: You just want me to say what you want me to say.
.]
Cate Blanchett: I don't feel like, now I'm a great actress.
I never feel that.
You always think, "OK, I've learned that.
Well, now what if I did that?" They call her a chameleon - the way she almost molts into her characters, as when she played Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator," for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress.
[Cate as Katharine Hepburn: You're not extending enough on your follow-through.
Follow-through is everything in golf, just like life.
Hahaha, don't you find?!.]
She spent weeks with a voice coach perfecting Hepburn's distinctive accent.
Lesley Stahl: Can you speak Katharine Hepburn? Cate Blanchett: No, I can't do anything.
I'm terrible.
I'm the worst dinner party guest in the world.
People say, "Oh, do-- do your Scottish," and I'll go, "Okee.
I'll do me--" I sound like I'm a cross between sort of from New Delhi, and-- Boston.
It's terrible.
In "Blue Jasmine" she plays a desperate Park Avenue socialite who loses her life of status and luxury when her husband turns out to be a swindler like Bernie Madoff.
[Clip from "Blue Jasmine": Uh, I was forced to take a job selling shoes on Madison Avenue.
Ugh, so humiliating.
Friends I'd had at dinner parties at our apartment came in and I waited on them.
I mean, do you have any idea what that's like?.]
Cate Blanchett: She was monumentally deluded.
And like a lot of us, I mean, we - we-- our lives are built on a fictionalized sense of self.
Who we would - who we aspire to be, rather than perhaps who we actually are.
Lesley Stahl: You do a lot of research.
You're known for reading, watching videos, getting- Cate Blanchett: It's enjoyable.
It's enjoyable.
Lesley Stahl: Is it true that you watched the 60 Minutes Morley Safer interview of Ruth Madoff? [Ruth Madoff on 60 Minutes: If I could change things, at least if I had tried, I would have felt a little better.
.]
Lesley Stahl: Bernie Madoff's wife-- Cate Blanchett: Yes, absolutely-- Lesley Stahl: Did that help you? Did it? Cate Blanchett: It did.
I think that what I really got from them, that Madoff interview, was the sense of shame.
And I found that very useful.
One critic called it "the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career.
" Clip from "Blue Jasmine": You know, someday when you come into great wealth, you must remember to be generous.
But for Blanchett, Woody Allen's notoriously minimal direction was unnerving.
Lesley Stahl: You really love to talk things out.
And as I understand it, that's not his style.
Cate Blanchett: No.
He's monosyllabic at best.
I don't know how to do this thing unless it's in conversation with somebody else.
I can't-monologue is - terrifies me.
Lesley Stahl: But that's what you got.
Cate Blanchett: First day he said, "It's awful.
You're awful.
" Lesley Stahl: To you? Cate Blanchett: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: He said "awful"? Cate Blanchett: "It's awful.
" Lesley Stahl: But he didn't say what to do? He just said, "It's awful"? Cate Blanchett: No.
No.
Lesley Stahl: So then you did it again-- Cate Blanchett: And it was still awful.
But -- Lesley Stahl: It was still awful? Cate Blanchett: Well, obviously, it got a bit better because it didn't-- you know, people have gone to see it.
Her breakthrough role came in 1998 as the queen of England in "Elizabeth.
" [Cate in "Elizabeth": I am married to England.
.]
After that performance, she was offered other big parts, but went for characters who stretched her, rather than ones that would make her famous.
Even though she's often on the red carpet these days, Blanchett never sought to be a movie star, nor did she think she'd ever be one.
She's the middle child of a school teacher mother and transplanted Texan father, who died when she was 10.
She dropped out of college to study theater.
What she wanted was to be was a great stage actress and got her first major role in a play here at the Sydney Theater Company.
Cate Blanchett: There's a photo over here-- In 1993, she co-starred with fellow Aussie Geoffrey Rush in David Mamet's "Oleanna.
" Lesley Stahl: Look how into it you are.
You are so inside.
Cate Blanchett: It was one of those plays.
["Oleanna" clip, Australian TV - Cate: You can look at yourself and you can see those things that I see.
And you can find revulsion equal to my own.
Good day!.]
Lesley Stahl: You were a triumph in it.
People were dazzled.
Cate Blanchett: Yeah, the director actually almost sacked me.
And that was probably a big motivator for me to do a better job-- Lesley Stahl: Are you one of those people-- are you one of those people that-- Cate Blanchett: Likes to be terrified.
Lesley Stahl: Likes to be terrified? Cate Blanchett: I think it's the only way to work for me-- Lesley Stahl: It motivates you? Cate Blanchett: Yeah.
I'm much better with truth.
Lesley Stahl: Even if it hurts? Cate Blanchett: Even if it hurts.
Lesley Stahl: Well, I think you've talked about the whole process as the trapeze effect.
You're flying up there, and you could fall.
Cate Blanchett: Yes-- Lesley Stahl: It's fear.
Cate Blanchett: When you're stretching yourself, as a role like "Blue Jasmine" did for me, you risk falling flat on your face.
She applies that same risk-taking to her personal life, like when she and Andrew Upton, a playwright and director, decided to get married on a whim.
They were both part of the Sydney Theater crowd.
Lesley Stahl: How did you meet? How did the sparks start? Andrew Upton: The sparks started slowly, I think, personally.
Cate Blanchett: We didn't like each other.
Andrew Upton: We didn't get on at all at first sight-- Lesley Stahl: Really? Cate Blanchett: And then all of a sudden, we played poker one night and you were telling me about how you were in love with a friend of mine, and then we kissed.
Lesley Stahl: And, all of a sudden, you're asking her to marry you, real fast as I understand it.
Andrew Upton: I think it was about 21 days.
Lesley Stahl: And you said yes right away? Three weeks? Cate Blanchett: Yeah.
You leap off at the same time.
And I think it's all about timing.
She says their marriage is a partnership in the raising of their three sons, ages 5, 9 and 12 and in their careers.
Upton has been her collaborator and sounding board.
And they share a love of their country.
She's Australian through and through, down-to-earth and happy to be 18 time zones away from Hollywood.
Cate Blanchett: I adore Australia.
I mean, I live and work here.
And I'm buoyed up by it.
I'm inspired by it.
As she took us for a walk along the Sydney coast, she talked about her private life.
Except for her husband, the only member of the family we'd be allowed to film would be the dog Fletcher.
Her home and her children were off limits.
In the late 90s, she and Upton moved to England and her movie career took off.
But in 2006, the Sydney Theater Company invited them to come back and take over as co-artistic directors and they jumped at it.
Cate Blanchett: It was one of the quickest decisions I think we made once the offer had come our way, apart from how quickly we got married.
Maybe in the same spirit, strangely.
Andrew Upton: Yeah, I think it was in the same spirit of adventure.
It's a job they shared for six years.
It kept Cate in Sydney, allowing her to spend more time with their children, and to return to her first love, theater.
Lesley Stahl: So this is wardrobe.
While she acted in some of the productions, she also became an administrator, overseeing things like wardrobe and props.
She and Upton hired big name directors - and brought the company international acclaim with ambitious productions like "Streetcar Named Desire," which they took to New York in 2009, with Cate as Blanche Dubois.
Lesley Stahl: It is so intense.
It was so intense.
How long does it take you to come down from an experience on the stage like that? Cate Blanchett: At the time you just -- you do eight shows a week, my hair was falling out by the end, and I mean- Lesley Stahl: Your-- is that true? Cate Blanchett: Yeah.
It was not-- Lesley Stahl: Your hair was falling out 'cause you put so much into it-- Cate Blanchett: But I think I was just so exhausted by, by it.
She's known for being low maintenance, her drama's strictly onscreen or on stage.
When we met her before a performance of Uncle Vanya, she was doing her own makeup.
[Clip from Uncle Vanya: Your life should not be to grumble and moan.
.]
Well, what's she like after a performance? Lesley Stahl: Does she stay in the role? Andrew Upton: No.
Lesley Stahl: She comes home and she's still Blanche DuBois that night-- Cate Blanchett: Don't answer that, Andrew.
Lesley Stahl: She comes home and she's Cate? Andrew Upton: Yeah-- Lesley Stahl: After these emotional, powerful-- Andrew Upton:: Yeah.
Quite calm and chirpy.
She says she's not a "method" actor who "mines" her inner-self to unlock a character.
Cate Blanchett: It has nothing to do with me and the fact that my dog died or my father died with my-- when I was 10, and making the grief small and personal and inward.
And so therefore you don't carry it home because you're not going through some personal, inward self-analysis every night that could eat you away.
You're giving it away to the audience and hopefully, if it works, then, it's their-- they have-- it's their problem-- Lesley Stahl: They take it in.
Well, yeah-- Cate Blanchett: They can take it home.
In December, Cate decided to leave the Sydney Theater Company and a job she loved.
Lesley Stahl: What went into that decision? Cate Blanchett: The children.
You could feel their school needs beginning to grow.
They actually need that attention and, at a certain point, you have to make a decision about that, and that's not something we want to outsource.
Now her decisions about what roles to take in movies include how long she'd have to be away from home or whether she can take the boys with her on location, as she did with "Blue Jasmine" - her comeback to the movies, which she has done with a roar.
Lesley Stahl: You're 44 years old.
Cate Blanchett: Am I? We don't need to discuss that.
Lesley Stahl: Yeah, you are- Cate Blanchett: We don't need to rub that in.
Let's not-- Lesley Stahl: I'm not rubbing it in.
I think it's great to be 44, frankly.
But it can be a tough age for an actress.
At least, that's the myth, I guess.
Because for you, it's been a fabulous age.
Cate Blanchett: Well, I came to the film industry- I mean, in actress years, I was pushing 80.
Because I was in my mid-20s when I made my first film.
Now her movie career is so hot, she's already signed up for seven films.
She's booked solid through at least 2015.
Lesley Stahl: What is the hardest part of your job? The thing you struggle with the most? Cate Blanchett: Oh, look.
Is it hard? I don't know that it's hard.
I'm an actress.
I think the most complicated thing - it's the military maneuver of getting two careers, three children, but that's a working mother's problem, working parents' problem - that's not the challenge of work.
I think in relation to the work, the trickiest thing is beginning.
I think it's quite a tricky neuro-linguistic process actually to try and make something that another, that a character said, to make it come out through your body and make it seem like that's natural.
It's kind of tricking yourself; the confidence trick.
Like an athlete does, you have to just say: "I'm just going to start.
I'm ready.
I'm open.
Let's go.
"