Documents / FOIA release
This is a Joint Publications Research Service translation, report JPRS-USP-91-002, of a KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA article from 22 September 1990 by correspondent Ye. Chernykh in Prague. It takes up a Hungarian book by I. Nemere that claims Yuriy Gagarin did not make the 12 April 1961 flight. It quotes the Czechoslovak space writer Karel Patsner, who rejects the rumors of hidden cosmonaut deaths, citing James Oberg, Charles Sheldon's congressional report and CIA archive documents. UFOs come up only in passing, as an outdated sensation.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 ## Document 3 of 10 Page 4 November of 1967: ''Up to 1967, not a single country had lost a single crew during a space flight... The stories that a lot of Russians had died in space are difficult to refute because they are so persistent and supplied with names and dates. Even such a prominent informant as 0. Penkovskiy (an American spy--Ed.) wrote in his reports about those difficulties. However, American government employees has assured Congress several times that the United States did not have any information about such Soviet losses. 14. Even F. Klass as well, in the book "'Taynaya strazha v kosmose'" [The Secret Watch in Space], which is devoted to space-based espionage, has no doubts about Gagarin being the first. The network of American ground tracking stations along the Soviet borders and the reconnaissance satellites make it possible to follow all the flight preparations in the USSR. For example, President J. Kennedy knew about the successful launch of G. Titov in August of 1961 even before it was officially announced by TASS. In 1975, a law was passed in the United States regarding the declassification of old information from the intelligence services. M. Kassut, a writer, found nine documents in the CIA [TsRU] archives about the training of cosmonauts for the years 1960-1975. And in not a single one was there even a hint of any suspicions by the intelligence agents about secret Soviet space flights and catastrophes. 15. 'I believe that I. Nemere is one of those authors who are trying to acquire money and fame from the wave of anti-Sovietism which has flared up in the former communist countries,' wrote K. Patsner at the end of his article in defense of Gagarin. 17. 'Karel, what do you mean 1960? Even in the 1980's, Komsomolka [KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA] could not have pushed through Yaroslav Golovanov's article 'Kosmonavt nomer odin,' where, for the first time, the truth was disclosed about that detachment. And, in order to publish the book of the same name in 1986, in the time of glasnost, you yourself wrote that Yaroslav needed the personal permission of one of the members of the Politburo.' 16. 'If, in 1960, you had published in the press that a cosmonaut training detachment had been formed and if you had given all the names of the candidates, is it likely that rumors would have arisen around Gagarin?' Patsner said to me. 18. ''In the summer of 1964, S.P. Korolev vacationed in Czechoslovakia. Prior to that, Gagarin was here, he liked 'Golden Prague' very much and he talked about it a lot to Sergey Pavlovich. The chief designer was here incognito. He was not even registered in the guest book of the Czechoslovak Communist Party's Central Committee. When he was leaving, he said then to his entourage: 'When
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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. 5 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.