60 Minutes - 06/01/2025: Cuban Spycraft, Robo, Dua Lipa

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

For decades, prolific Cuban spies working in the U.S. government, serving in high profile positions with top security clearances, have evaded American intelligence officials. Correspondent Cecilia Vega reports from Washington, D.C. and Miami on the stories of two such undercover agents, former U.S. Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha and onetime Pentagon official Ana Montes. Cuba continues to supply one of the most dangerous exports to American adversaries around the world: American secrets. For centuries, the giants of the art world, like Michelangelo, have made a beeline for the world-famous Carrara marble quarries of Northern Tuscany, turning the white stone into masterpieces. Now, a fleet of robots has moved in, carving with pinpoint precision and sparking an art world fracas. Correspondent Bill Whitaker travels to Carrara and jumps into the fray: can a robot make art? While many contemporary A-listers are turning to robots for help, many of Italy’s hammer-and-chisel brigade are up in arms. They claim Italy’s artistic heritage is on the line. Many teenagers want to become pop stars, but few convince their parents to let them pack their bags and move to another country to make it big. That’s precisely what Dua Lipa did when she was 15 years old, trading Pristina, Kosovo, for London. Correspondent Anderson Cooper talks with her about her journey from unknown songwriter to international sensation. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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hunt down season. So drink it up with Tim's ice lattes, now whipped for a smooth taste. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a smooth taste. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Tonight, the story of two Americans with top security clearances and how they spied on behalf of Cuba, which bartered and sold America's secrets to its enemies around the world.

Do you think there are other Anamanteses in the government right now? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's chilling. There's no doubt that the Cubans are still penetrating our government with individuals who are loyal to them and not to us. individuals who are loyal to them and not to us. Meet Robo, one of the robots sculpting marble mined from a famous Italian quarry.

Watch Leonardo da Vinci's hat get adjusted, not with a hammer and chisel, but with a 13-foot arm spinning and a diamond-crusted finger. So if you were doing this the old-fashioned way, hammer and chisel, how long would this take? Ten times more, at least. It's unbelievable seeing that many people sing back at you. Will you be mine? Will you be mine? I couldn't believe that it was happening in that moment, you know.

I'd dreamt about being on that stage my whole life. I'd thought about it, I'd wished it. You'd envisioned it. I'd envisioned it so many times. I can show that I won't let you down, run. No, I won't let you down and run. Cause I could be the one. Hey! Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, 60 minutes.

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made with real fruit. In April of last year, a career American ambassador pleaded guilty to spying for the intelligence service of Cuba. Victor Manuel Rocha served his country in positions that required the highest levels of security clearance. For 40 years, he was a covert agent. Before Ambassador Rocha was exposed, there was another prolific Cuban spy named Ana

Montes, a Pentagon official who was the lead analyst on Cuba policy. She spied for 17 years. But Cuban spycraft isn't just a relic of the Cold War. It's a real and present danger to U.S. national security. It turns out, as we first reported in 2024, Cuba's main export isn't cigars or rum, it's American secrets, which they barter and sell to America's enemies around the world. It was 1999, and then First Lady Hillary Clinton danced with the president of Argentina at

a state dinner. President Clinton also danced the tango across the White House ballroom. There in front, wearing glasses and the airs of an aristocrat, stood Victor Manuel Rocha. He was the number two diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, with an impeccable reputation as a senior statesman on Latin America. He served on the National Security Council and became the ambassador to Bolivia, seen here alongside that country's president, all that time while having the highest top-secret security clearance with access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Rocha's arrest. He was charged with spying for Cuba for his entire career. This action exposes one of the highest reaching and longest lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent. In 2022, a man claiming to be a Cuban intelligence officer contacted Rocha and asked to meet. Rocha agreed. He had no idea the man was an undercover FBI agent. Over three meetings in Miami, the FBI recorded Rocha with a hidden camera. And according to the complaint, Rocha bragged that he got away with decades of spying by memorizing the secrets he stole. Rocha told the agent,

what we have done, it's enormous, more than a grand slam. He called the U.S. quote, the enemy. What do you think is the extent of damage that he did to national security? Manuel Rocha did enormous damage to American security. Brian Lattell was the CIA's top Cuba analyst at the height of the Cold War. He says in the 1980s, Rocha cold called and struck up a professional relationship. They remained friends for decades.

You think he approached you to get information out of you ultimately? Yes. He never got any. Did you see any signs that he was leading a double life? None. None? None.

What can you tell me about the tradecraft that Cuba uses? They do it very, very well in mostly rudimentary fashions. The Cubans are not flying satellites anywhere in the world. Nearly all of their ability and success has been in the dimension of human intelligence. Their officers, their intelligence agents and officers are very, very good. They know their tradecraft, they practice it with great skill and with discipline,

and when they recruit, they're very careful about how they recruit and how they communicate. And what does Cuba do with the information it gets from all these spies? They have no scruples about sharing the information or perhaps marketing it, selling it to other countries. The Russians, maybe the Chinese.

If they collect information about U.S. intentions, policy intentions toward Moscow or Beijing or Tehran. It would be of interest to those countries. That was this man's job when he was a Cuban intelligence officer, decoding messages intercepted from the U.S. Jose Cohen defected in 1994. Cuba shared that information with enemies of the United States, he told us. Countries like the Soviet Union for years, countries like North Korea, countries like

Iran had information about the operation of the Defense Department. You say Cuba may not have the weapons, Cuba may not have the arms, but they sell these secrets to the enemies of the United States. The strongest enemies of the United States. All of that was what made me realize this is a battle between good and evil. Cuba was at the service of all the enemies of the United States. After Jose Cohen set foot on U.S. soil, he shared a vital piece of information with the FBI. That led to the investigation of more than 100 suspected Cuban agents and illegal officers,

and ultimately one very important spy. Cohen handed over an encryption key like this one, used by Cuban spies to send and receive secret messages with Havana. Three nights a week at 9 p.m. and then again at 10, a series of numbered codes was broadcast out of Havana. The signal could be heard for most of the 1990s up the East Coast as far north as Maine, but the coded messages were only meant to be decoded by their agents, including a Pentagon analyst named Ana Montes, who lived in this quiet Washington neighborhood.

This is where she did all of the business, all the spy business. Exactly. I mean, she would listen to the high frequency messages upstairs Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday night. She would type up her messages on her computer in her bedroom right up here. This is the area that she lived in, camouflaged. The fact that she was committing espionage right here. He says...

Peter Lapp is a retired FBI special agent who was on the team that led the Montez investigation. How'd she do it? She went to work, memorized three things every day, went home and all classified, and then would write them up or type them up. And then every two or three weeks, she would meet in person at lunch, broad daylight, two to three hours over lunch. Maybe I've seen too many movies when I think spies. I'm thinking Dark of Night, Park Bench, secret cameras, fancy gadgets.

Right. That wasn't her. Everyone who works for the intelligence community goes home with classified information in their head. And you can't stop that with guards and technology. It's just, it's undefeatable. Lapp wrote a book on the FBI investigation into Montez. He told us Havana doesn't pay its spies,

so Americans who spy for Cuba don't do it for money, but rather are driven by ideology. Ambassador Rocha was recruited in the late 1970s, influenced, he now says, by the radical politics of the day. Montes was a student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the 1980s, and was outspoken about her anger toward U.S. policy in Latin America when she was recruited

by a Cuban intelligence officer. Montes' father was a U.S. policy in Latin America when she was recruited by a Cuban intelligence officer. Montes's father was a U.S. Army doctor, and her siblings worked for the FBI. One of her first jobs out of graduate school was as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. So, Ana Montes was already a full-fledged Cuban spy from the moment that she set foot inside the Defense Intelligence Agency.

She walked in fully recruited, day one. Only went to DIA for the purpose of spying for the Cubans. And when you think about the other folks that have been arrested for espionage, most start loyal. They take the oath. They intend to abide by that oath. But then something happens and they flip. Ana is unique in the sense that she walked in from day one and was an insider threat

and only went for the purpose of spying for the Cubans. How does a Cuban spy walk through the doors of the DIA and get a job? She didn't have to take a polygraph? They did not have a polygraph program at the time. Over the course of her career, she became such an expert that she was known in the intelligence community as the queen of Cuba. All the while, she was exposing national secrets to Havana. The FBI surveilled her for a year before her arrest as she walked to work and called her Cuban handler. By that time, she had revealed the existence of a top-secret satellite program used by the U.S. to spy on other countries.

She also gave Havana the names of 450 American intelligence officials working on Latin American issues, including four undercover officers stationed in Cuba. And she got away with it for 17 years, until she was arrested in 2001 at her office by FBI Special Agent Peter Lapp and his partner Stephen McCoy. She didn't fit the profile of a typical spy. No. Being a woman is incredibly unique, so it doesn't fit that typical what we would look for in a spy, which is mostly men. Montes pleaded guilty to espionage, and in exchange for not spending the rest of her life in prison,

she agreed to tell the FBI everything she had done. I wouldn't mind at all meeting two Fridays a month. Through a public records request, we obtained this footage, seen here for the first time, of Montes wearing prison stripes, speaking with FBI investigators. Citing Montes' right to privacy, the FBI denied our request for the recorded audio of their interviews. But we obtained a declassified transcript of the first day, where Montes described how deep in she was.

She said, Ever since I started helping the Cubans, there's been no halfway. I don't really know how a person does it without feeling morally bound. It's a full commitment, mentally, physically, emotionally. I feel that what I did was morally right, that I was faithful to principles that were right. Montes told the agents her only regret was that she was forced to cooperate with the FBI as part of her plea deal. It's tearing me up, she said, but if the only way I'm going to see my family again, it's the only way.

Agent Lapp sat across from Ana Montes in the interrogation room for seven months. He said one of the most sobering moments was when she said how far she would have been willing to go for the Cubans in the week after 9-11. She said, if the Cubans asked me to provide them with intelligence about what we were doing in Afghanistan, I absolutely would have done that. And if men and women were killed as a result of my

intelligence in Afghanistan, she told us that's the risk that they took. What was the extent of the damage that she did? I do think she's in that tier of some of the most notorious spies in American history and I think the damage that she did was incredibly significant. After serving 20 years in federal prison, Ana Montes was released in January 2023. She's now living in Puerto Rico, where she has family and has been celebrated by some as a hero, seen here recently receiving an award from supporters. Through a lawyer, Montes declined our request for an interview.

Former Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha told a judge he was deeply sorry and pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of the Cuban government. At age 73, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and is currently cooperating with investigators. Just how many state secrets he gave to Cuba, we may never know. Nearly all the details of his spy craft remain classified. Ana Montes has yet to publicly express any remorse. Do you think there are other Ana Monteses in the government right now? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

That's chilling. There's no doubt that the Cubans and the Russians and others are still penetrating our government with individuals who are loyal to them and not to us. Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments. Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game. Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. The credit card that rewards your good financial habits. Earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month.

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for a perfect block of marble. He searched for months until he found it. His name was Michelangelo, and the marble became his immortal, the Pietà. Since then, many other giants—think Bernini, Canova—have put their chisels to Carrara Stone. Now there's an upstart, and like his star predecessors he goes by a single name, Robo. Robo is part of a fleet of robots shaking up the art world, carving with pinpoint precision and in record time. But as we first reported last fall, not everyone is happy. One artist told us Michelangelo would be rolling in his grave.

The jagged ridges of the Apuan Alps stretch for 30 miles across northern Tuscany. Even in summer, their dazzling peaks seem covered in snow. But get up close. It's not snow, it's marble. Peel away the forest, wash away the soil, you'll find whole mountains of the most sought-after marble in the world. It's remarkable. Yes, we are now approaching the Ravaccone Valley, the valley where you can find the stones that Michelangelo used in the past.

We were traveling with Giacomo Massari, the CEO and co-founder of Robator, a company that makes robots that sculpt. Some of this is in the statue of David. Yes. This was Michelangelo's old stomping grounds. We passed quarry after quarry. There are more than 600 above Carrara.

The glare from the gleaming rock was intense when suddenly we hurtled into darkness. Look at this. A tunnel cuts straight into the heart of a marble mountain. We drove until we could go no farther. A tunnel cut straight into the heart of a marble mountain. We drove until we could go no farther. Our work starts from here. The first hard part is to get the stone.

We reached what quarrymen call the cathedral. Let's try not to fall. The track down was slimy with marble mud. The cathedral, this is mind blowing. From the floor, walls of stone towered above us. Giacomo Massari told us Carrara's miners had hollowed out the vast cavern over 200 years. We had come to see Robitor's next project, a monumental block of marble about the size of a railway car, 200,000 pounds of flawless Carrara stone.

You're going to move this block out of here? We are going to move this big boy out of here. How? There are going to be a couple of cranes and a huge truck to lift it. A feat not possible in Michelangelo's time, but then neither was this. Meet Robo, one of the brigade of robots taking over sculpture. We watched as Leonardo da Vinci's trademark hat was adjusted,

not with a hammer and chisel, but a 13-foot zinc alloy arm and a spinning diamond-crusted finger. Water jets kept Leonardo cool. This was a week's work for Robo, with another two to go. So if you were doing this the old-fashioned way, hammer and chisel, how long would this take? 10 times more, at least.

10 times longer. Yeah, absolutely. Massari told us his mechanical employees, seven and counting, don't sleep, get sick, or take holidays. He took robots off the automotive line and gave them bigger brains. And the robot will work all these ridges.

Roboteurs chief technician also a sculptor turns the artist's model into a 3d file that generates a complex set of instructions that tells the robot exactly where to carve right down to the last half inch. How much of the work is done by the robot and the computer and how much by the human artist? We are talking a very high percentage that can be done by the machining. Like how much? Like 99%. 99%? Yeah. And the very final 1% that is the most important is still done by very skilled artisans in our workshop.

Just one percent? But that one percent, Massari told us, can translate into months of human work. Still we wondered, was using a robot a bit like cheating? If you have a robot doing 99% of the work, where's the artistry? In the idea, how you program the machine is a work of art, because it's an artistic approach. You need to have a sculptural background to program the machine

in the way that you want. Massari says Michelangelo, like other A-listers, employed dozens of apprentices who worked anonymously behind the scenes. Now it's the robot's turn. But not every artist wants to admit they have a robot on the payroll. There was work we couldn't film commissioned by big-name artists who insist their identities remain secret.

Why is that? I think they are afraid, because most of the people, if you ask a direct question, do you like that this artwork is made by a robot, yes or no, nine out of 10 will say no. Do you think that people would think the robot's doing all the work? Yes, but it doesn't make your idea weaker or stronger.

If your idea is bad, you can make it with a robot or make it by hand. Still, the final artwork will be bad. But if your idea is good, if you make it with a robot or not, it will be still good. But Tuscan artist Michael Montroni told us only a human touch can coax the divine out of a stone.

And that sounds like this. Monfroni told us Michelangelo would never lower himself to using a robot, and neither would he. And he says he despairs at seeing the master's work being copied by robots. It's sacrilege, he told us. Sculpting is passion. Robots are business. Manfroni first picked up a chisel at age seven, learning the trade from his father.

Now those skills are on the brink of extinction. You have said, if you use a machine, you become a machine. Yes, because your mind is limited by the technology, he told us. It's only a computer program transmitted to the robot. You lose the satisfaction of having created a piece of art by hand. Manfroni is not alone. The prestigious Sculptors Guild of Carrara is dead set against robots, too. They warn that Italy's artistic heritage is at risk. There is a conservative mindset that wants to hold on to some imagined ancient way of approaching art that's mystifying to me.

Barry X. Ball is a contemporary artist based in New York City. He uses eye-popping stone to make works that have been shown at major museums around the world. He's a regular shopper here in Carrara. These blocks go for about $300,000. And on a recent trip, he bought a robot, too. Ball told us he's come under fire for using them. I hear a kind of fear that's almost like they're gonna take our way of making sculpture away from us.

Not trying to do that, we're trying to add to it. I know you've heard the criticism that this is cheating. What do you say to people who think that? Number one, they don't understand the process. They think we're pressing print and the robot is plopping out a sculpture. We're very involved in the middle of that as humans with that creative process. But here it looks like...

Ball told us the robot made impossible art possible. Take Michelangelo's Pietà Rondinini. He was still working on it when he died. Zoom in on the front of the sculpture. Using a scan of the unfinished work, Ball created something new. If we can get this head in there. Instead of the roughed out face of Jesus,

Ball gave the Son of God the face of dying Michelangelo. This is straight up and down. We need to tilt that back. Yep, exactly. He broadened the pedestal and more. I hope he's looking down on us giving his approval. Then the robot got to work, peeling away the stone until Ball's new pieta emerged. Ball left some of the milling marks visible.

It's like you want people to know that the robot was a partner in this? It also gives this incredibly beautiful effect, which to me, the first time I saw a robot milled surface looked exactly like the fluting you see in Egyptian drapery. Ball told us he employs six finishers for every robot. His Pietà was shown at a museum in Milan. Carrara's miners pull out about a billion tons of marble a year from the quarries. Most is destined for kitchen countertops and bathrooms. Modern artists had begun to shun marble because it was too difficult to work and time consuming.

begun to shun marble because it was too difficult to work and time-consuming. Robitor argues the robots are reviving Carrara's artistic fortunes by doing the heavy lifting. To be honest, no one really likes the hard rough cutting. It's tough work, running a saw, whacking away big blocks. So everyone is really excited to be able to let part of that go. Vermont-based artist Richard Erdmann told us he added a robot to his team in Carrara about a year ago. After two back surgeries and 40 years in the business, he was ready for some mechanical help.

The other thing about the Robo which is advantageous is there are no mistakes. When you're hand cutting... No mistakes? No, when you're hand cutting with a diamond saw, it's a five inch blade, you're following your model with compasses, you can go too far if the cutter isn't skillful enough. And that's a mistake. The Robo is perfectly accurate. Erdmann's sculptures are held by more than a hundred galleries and

museums worldwide. In 1983 he made his breakout piece, Passage. You can almost push it now with your hand it's so close to falling. A huge sculpture cut from a 700 ton block of Italian travertine. Working with a diamond saw, a jackhammer, and a polishing team, it took two years. Robo, Erdman says, would have helped. It sounds like the robot is your colleague. It's not just a machine. When that arm is moving around, I'm really part of it.

It's following your design, it's part of you, it's a machine that's beside the point. It's friendly, we all love it. There's no way around it. Were you skeptical of the robots in the beginning? Yes, we were, but one has to embrace it. The business is changing so fast with a robo that an artist that does not embrace the robo in their work is really

going to be the artist left behind. Erdman says now his robo does about half the work. Then he takes over, polishing the marble until it glows and finishing those hard to get at places that the diamond finger still can't reach. At least not yet. For now, the sounds that Michelangelo would have made still ring out. The marble will be here for generations, but we wondered how long will the sound. At Desjardins Insurance, we know that when you're a building contractor, your company's

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That's what Dua Lipa did when she was just 15 years old. She'd taken some singing lessons but didn't know anything about the business of making music. Turns out she's a quick study. As we first reported last fall, at 29 she's now one of the top female recording artists in the world. Take a look at what happened last summer when she headlined Britain's biggest music festival, Glastonbury. She was singing one of the first songs she released nine years ago. Back then hardly anyone knew who Dua Lipa was. But at Glastonbury, a hundred thousand people came to see her. They sang along to her every word. Glass to free as loud as you can, come on! I'm gonna give you more! Oh my god.

One more time, louder! I'm gonna give you more! I love you guys, you're making my dreams come true. Louder! I'm gonna give you more! Be the one, be the one, be the one, be the one, be the one, be the one. I'm gonna give you more. It's unbelievable seeing that many people sing back at you.

I couldn't believe that it was happening in that moment, you know. I'd dreamt about being on that stage my whole life. I'd thought about it, I'd wished it. You'd envisioned it. I'd envisioned it so many times. Oh baby come on let me get to know you Just another chance so that I can show That I'm on the two down from I had written down I want to headline Glastonbury on the pyramid stage on the Friday night.

Being very specific about the Friday night so I could party afterwards. Wait a minute, so even in your dream it was due Friday night so you could stay at Glastonbury? So I could stay Saturday, Sunday. And go out dancing and be in the crowds. Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, you've got to be specific about your dreams, you know? Dua Lipa isn't afraid to admit she enjoys a good time. And that's what her music is all about. The songs are fun and flirtatious. She sings of boy breakups and girl power. Late nights and dark clubs. It is pure pop. Dua Lipa's got no problem with that. You're always met with some kind of pushback as a female artist.

If you're not like with a guitar or with a piano, just like, oh, she can't sing. Oh, it's all processed or it's this or it's whatever. I just think there's just like, oh, she can't sing, oh, it's all processed, or it's this, or it's whatever. I just think there's just like a stigma around pop music. But that was the music which you wanted to do from the beginning. Because I loved it. That's the music that makes me get up and dance. You want me, I want you baby.

A sugar boy, I'll let you take it. Don't let the laid back demeanor fool you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got you. Dua Lipa has worked hard and come a long way to make all this look easy. Dua, whose name means love in Albanian, was born in London. Her parents had moved there from Kosovo after the war in Bosnia broke out in 1992. She started singing lessons at nine,

but her family returned to Kosovo when she was 11. Four years later, she decided to go back to Britain and try and become a pop star. That was the plan? That was the plan, always. The pitch to your parents was, in order to go to a British university, I need to go to high school.

Yeah, that was the initial pitch. Her father, Dukagene Lipa, is now her manager. Did you buy that pitch? Of course we did. But she's underplaying the fact that she was always very mature. Even at 15? Even at 15.

And yeah, it is a little bit crazy saying, oh, 15 years old, she persuaded you to let her go. But her maturity and our relationship was... You knew she could handle it? Of course. It sounds like you were a very confident 15 year old. Yeah, I think more confident than I am now, for sure. Really?

I'm Dua, I'm 15 years old, and I'm gonna be singing Super Duper Love by Just Don't. Mwah. When you promise me, In London, she immediately started recording herself and I'm gonna be singing Super Duper Love by Just Don't. Mwah. ["Super Duper Love"] In London, she immediately started recording herself singing covers of her favorite artists and putting the videos on YouTube. This is one of the first ones she made in 2011.

She was living with a family friend, but was pretty much on her own. She skipped school so often, she flunked out. Basically, I got expelled, and I remember calling my parents, and they're like, okay, well, you did this. Find yourself a school, or you're gonna come back to Kosovo.

Baby, I'd rather be home She did find another high school and graduated, Find yourself a school or you're gonna come back to Kosovo. ["Walk Away from Me"] She did find another high school and graduated, but decided college could wait. Her cover songs online had gotten some notice. Just three years after leaving Kosovo, 18-year-old Dua Lipa got a record deal with Warner Brothers. ["Walk Away from Me"] Maybe I'd rather be blind, boy Than say walk away, walk away from me

I walked in with a dream of I want to sing, I want to perform, I want to write But I had no idea of what comes with it or what other things I have to do or even what goes into the promotion of a record. And I've been through mountains and seas While working on her first album, she began releasing singles and performing wherever she could. Now I find it harder and harder to breathe We were doing really small shows

where the stage was like a step above the floor. So how many people liked it for your first performances? About ten. Ten? Wow. And how many were friends and family? Well, none, but they all got offered a drink to come and watch. So that was how we got them to come and watch us before. It's like puppet show and Spinal Tap.

It's like beer and Dua Lipa. Exactly. Talking in my sleep at night, making myself crazy. That all changed in 2017 when her first album came out and she made this music video in a hotel in Miami for a song called New Rules. One, don't pick up the phone. You know he's only calling hotel in Miami for a song called New Rules. It became her first major hit in America. The album would earn Dua Lipa two Grammys, one of them for Best New Artist.

When she sang New Rules at the Brit Awards on live TV in 2018, the reviews were positive. But some viewers' comments online weren't. One in particular went viral. The comment was from somebody that said, I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing. You remembered the words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just spread like wildfire that I had no stage presence or I couldn't perform. So I was like, all right, well, I'm just going to prove to you that I can perform and I can

dance and I can do all these things. Dua Lipa may have wanted to prove her doubters wrong, but when her second album, called Future Nostalgia, was ready to be released two years later, the timing could not have been worse. My second album came out in March 2020 at the very beginning of the pandemic. Was there any talk of delaying? Yeah, there was,

but because I had spent so long working on it, I was like, this album has to come out. With much of the world locked down, it wasn't clear if anyone would want to listen to dance songs or how she could even promote the album. My whole idea was that this is a record that's supposed to be played in the clubs. I envisioned myself in the club. In the producing of it, the whole thing is like you're in the club.

Dua, how are you? Good, how are you? Three days after the album's release, she gamely appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden. Her home had flooded and she was renting a small studio apartment. Oh my god, and I was having really, like, a bad... ...hair day. 180. Hair day. Crazy.

Thinking about the way I want to get the heartbreak. Change me. Everyone coming together in their living rooms and their kitchens to make this happen. It's crazy. Walk away. You know how. I love that you were in some random apartment.

Yeah, so you can see from there how close I am to the cupboards above, the oven and the like stove top This is you kicking off the release globally of your globally of my album The new album was an extraordinary success commercially and critically Billboard Rolling Stone and others called it one of the best of the year, and Dua Lipa was dubbed the quarantine queen. It worked out in a weird way. Yeah, it did. It didn't end up being, you know, the nightclub experience, but it ended up being the kitchen dance parties and the soundtrack to people's

workouts at home to kind of keep them sane during that time. It also gave people the fantasy of being out in a club. Being out, I hope so. Last year, she released her third album called Radical Optimism and was rehearsing for a year-long 28-country tour. I'm still getting my timing while I'm rehearsing. Those first beginning notes, the, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, they're really fast.

So I just have to like practice to make sure that I don't slow the song down and miss my timing. I need someone to hold me close deeper than I'm ever known Who that feels like a role In just nine years of releasing music, Dua Lipa has reached a level of success even she never imagined. Her songs have been streamed by fans more than 45 billion times. I saw some writers who said that in your songs they don't have a sense of who you are.

You're not pouring out your innermost fears and desires and wants. It's something that I just naturally hold back. Some people are just so ruthless with their own private life that they decide to put it all out in a song because they know that it's gonna attract people's attention. And for me, it was always important to make music that people really loved, um, not because I was putting someone out on blast or not because I'm doing it for the clickbait at maybe someone else's expense.

Dua Lipa's music may not be controversial, but some statements she's made over the past few years about Israel have been. She's called the current war in Gaza genocide, and in 2021, a well-known rabbi took out this full-page ad in the New York Times, criticizing her. There was a lot of words kind of thrown at me, things that I don't believe represent who I am or what I believe in at all.

Like I've always only ever wanted peace, really. It's devastating what's happening over there. There's bombs happening between both Israel and Palestine and children are dying and families are being separated and it's just devastating to sit back and see it happen. Some people are saying, what, you said it was anti-Semitic? Yeah, yeah.

And it's just not, I think it was very unfairly treated by the times. Did that experience make you reticent to be outspoken again? Uh, no, because it hasn't stopped me from talking about things that I believe in. Whatever Dua Lipa's political or personal opinions may be, for now you won't find them in her music. She wants that to be something that will help lift you up, get you out, and maybe, just maybe take a spin on the dance floor.

I'm Cecilia Vega. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.