On July 23, France and Britain had finally agreed to Russia’s proposal that military-staff talks be held at once to draw up a military convention which would spell out specifically how Hitler’s armies were to be met by the three nations. Although Chamberlain did not announce this agreement until July 31, when he made it to the House of Commons, the Germans got wind of it earlier. On
July 28 Ambassador von Welczeck in Paris wired Berlin that the had learned from “an unusually well-informed source” that France and Britain were dispatching military missions to Moscow and that the French group would be headed by General Doumenc, whom he described as being “a particularly capable officer” and a former Deputy Chief of Staff under General Maxime Weygand. It was the German ambassador’s impression, as he stated in a supplementary dispatch two days later, that Paris and London had agreed to military-staff talks as a last means of preventing the adjournment of the Moscow negotiations.
It was a well-founded impression. As the confidential British Foreign Office papers make clear, the political talks in Moscow had reached an impasse by the last week in July largely over the impossibility of reaching a definition of “indirect aggression.” To the British and French the Russian interpretation of that term was so broad that it might be used to justify Soviet intervention in Finland and the Baltic States even if there were no serious Nazi threat, and to this London at least – the French were prepared to be more accommodating – would not agree.
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich