Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an interview with Major General of Aviation Aleksey Leonov published in the Moscow journal Aviatsiya i Kosmonavtika. Leonov describes the Soviet manned lunar program, how the cosmonauts trained for it, and the test failures that ended it. He also criticizes Soviet secrecy and argues that the Buran shuttle is needed. Asked about UFO claims, he says Aldrin's remark 'they're watching us' referred to Earth, not extraterrestrials.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 Document 8 of 17 Page 4 Moon. True, in contrast to the American one, the capsule was to hold one person, but actions on the Moon and the return to Earth coincided fully. 16. I will remind you that the Soviet Union was performing parallel research of the Moon with automatic satellites. They gave us interesting data, even more complete than the Americans had at that time, but there also was one other distinction. 17. The accident on Apollo 13 connected with the explosion of a fuel cell demonstrated the very flexible thinking of U.S. leaders. By telling about everything honestly, they were able to unite the entire nation in those days. Literally all America followed this flight, suffered it, and suggested and thought how to save the crew. But our out-of-the-ordinary situations always were concealed in an attempt to prove the superiority of Soviet equipment. As a matter of fact, there were enormously more of them than the Americans had, but the people were not told about this. Therefore many got the impression that mastery of space was a rather simple matter and that upkeep of cosmonauts was costing the state dearly and was economically inexpedient. 18. [Kuznetsov] How did you follow the progress of the Americans' fulfillment of the Apollo program? 19. [Leonov] The entire world observed man's first landing on the Moon except for the Soviet Union and China. But with the exception of a maximum of a hundred persons who viewed the reports in one of the organizations, no one among Soviet citizens saw the launch of the craft and its landing on the Moon or the crew's actions. History appraised the merits of our ideologues Ponomarev and Suslov and the course along which they led the country. But the Americans have no false morality. In 1965 they gratefully received all our information on extravehicular activity and coordinated their program. While at first it was planned only to stick a hand out of the craft, subsequently they repeated my spacewalk and also used a handheld motor which permitted the astronaut somehow to control his body in space. Returning to the U.S. lunar program, I will say that there are no ''gaps'' in it for me. Moreover, I recorded the flights of Apollo 10 through 17 on video cassette. 20. [Kuznetsov] Did you see extraterrestrials on your films? UFO specialists assert that the first people on the Moon saw them and that extraterrestrials allegedly observed the astronauts. Is this true? 21. [Leonov] People fond of any sensations wrested a phrase from the astronauts' conversation and are building their fantasies on this.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 6 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.