"It just didn't fit."

Fascinating NRO piece here by Herbert Meyer, who was tasked during the Reagan Administration to figure out what it would look like if the USSR was crumbling from within:

The career analysts responded by digging in their heels; by insisting that the Soviet economy was growing steadily and dismissing the alternate hypothesis as unworthy of serious attention. So I wrote a lengthy “think piece” memo that simply made the assumption that the Soviet economy was shrinking, then outlined what the downward spiral would look like. Casey made sure that just about everyone inside the CIA and elsewhere in the intelligence community read that memo