economic deal throughout early 1939. For months, Germany had secretly hinted to Soviet diplomats that it could offer better terms for a political agreement than could Britain and France. On March 10, Hitler in his official speech proclaimed that directly. That same day, Stalin, in a speech to the Eighteenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, characterized western actions regarding Hitler as moving away from "collective security" and toward "nonintervention," with the goal being to direct Fascist aggression anywhere but against themselves. After the Congress concluded, the Soviet press mounted an attack on both France and Great Britain. Stalin believed that the British and French governments were engaging in conspiracy to direct Germany towards the east and cause a German-Soviet war. In the aftermath of the Great Terror, the maxim ugadat, ugodit, utselet ("sniff out, suck up, survive") dominated the Soviet regime and the NKVD tended to provide Stalin with intelligence that fitted his preconceptions, thus reinforcing what he already believed. Rudolf von Scheliha, the First Secretary at the German embassy in Warsaw had been working as a Soviet spy since 1937, keeping the Kremlin well informed about the state of German-Polish relations, and it was due to intelligence provided by him that the Soviets knew that Hitler was seriously considering invading Poland from March 1939 onward, giving the orders for an invasion of Poland in May. On 13 March 1939 Scheliha reported to Moscow that he had conversation with one of Ribbentrop's aides, a Peter Kleist, who told him Germany would probably attack Poland sometime that year. In his reports to Moscow, Scheliha made clear that the Auswärtiges Amt had attempted to reduce Poland down to a German satellite in the winter of 1938-39, and the Poles had refused to play that role. At the same time, the chief Soviet spy in Japan, Richard Sorge had reported to Moscow that the German attempt to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into a military alliance had failed, as Germany wanted the alliance to be directed against Britain while Japan wanted the alliance to be directed against the Soviet Union. On 5 April 1939, Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary at the Auswärtiges Amt ordered Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, the German ambassador to Poland, that he was under no conditions to engage in talks with the Poles over resolving the dispute over the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdansk) as the Danzig