I get the arguments for this idea. Why did USSR play along? They (claim they) had all the same transmissions and everything else we did, and they called us to congratulate us. I guess they could have just made a wild guess, but it seems more likely that they ... observed us land on the moon before calling us to congratulate us on landing on the moon.
Likewise we observed all their unmanned flights, and our records for all this agree.
Certainly, but once the US landed on the Moon, the Soviets shut down their heavy rocketry division entirely. That’s generally the money sink of spaceflight right now. Without a large scale financial goal in mind that requires larger rockets, they’re just a drain on resources and less efficient than smaller ones.
If it was all a money laundering scheme, we’d keep seeing huge rockets but no actual payloads to justify them. Hell, what (extremely little) we have done in the last 50 years since the end of real human spaceflight would have benefitted from larger rockets, and yet we still haven’t made any.
CIA claims they shut down a bunch of illegal programs and divisions. They just don't tell you about the identical one they started up immediately afterwards with all of the same technology and personnel.
Kind of hard to hide Saturn V launches. That’s why there genuinely haven’t been any since 1973.