August Anselm Wesslin was born in the industrial town of Tampere and emigrated to the United States in 1904 at the age of 17.

[citation needed] Wesley moved to Joensuu, in the remote province of North Karelia, the hometown of his spouse, Fanny Käyhkö.[when?]

He sneaked across the front line to the Red controlled southern Finland and headed to the capital city of Helsinki.

He moved to East Karelia and joined the Murmansk Legion, which was a British-organized unit comprising Finnish Red Guard fighters who had fled to Russia.

During the Allied North Russia Intervention, Wesley served as an interpreter and an intelligence officer and ranked as a British Navy lieutenant.

The Finnish commander of the Murmansk Legion, Verner Lehtimäki, stayed loyal to the Bolshevik government, but Wesley, Oskari Tokoi, and Karl Emil Primus-Nyman openly supported the Allies.

After the war, Wesley settled in Tallinn where he first worked for the ministry of social affairs and later as a journalist in the newspaper Vaba Maa.