Wilhelm Wassmuss

Wilhelm Wassmuss was born in 1880 in Ohlendorf, 60 kilometers south-east of Hanover, Germany, and after a university education he entered the German Foreign Office in 1906.

While the details of what happened next are sketchy, it seems that with the start of World War I, Wassmuss appears to have recognized that now was the time to foment a revolt.

He met with his superiors in Constantinople and as a result of that meeting, it was proposed that he organize and lead the Persians in a guerrilla war against Britain.

Although Wassmuss had no training in espionage, he became one of the first covert action operatives—an agent who does not specifically try to collect information but who functions in a foreign country to obtain a definite result.

From there Wassmuss' party moved eastward into Iran where he began work on a grandiose mission, something the empire-builders in Germany’s Foreign Office had dreamed about for years, the ending of Anglo-Russian domination in the Middle East.

Wilhelm Wassmuss would achieve further victory if he succeeded in bringing Iran into the war on the German side and, failing that, by organizing revolts among the Iranians against the British occupiers.

Wassmuss was a brave but short, broad and heavy man, with high forehead and blue eyes generally looking upward, and slightly melancholy mouth.

While always a fervently patriotic German, he was also a mystic, a megalomaniac and a fanatic, a European who had learned to love the Mesopotamian desert and had educated himself into an intimate knowledge of it, its people, and their customs and languages.

[5] This enabled Admiral Hall of the famed Room 40 to read German diplomatic communications through much of World War I (see Zimmermann Telegram).

They immediately galloped to Behbahan but once there, they lost valuable minutes through the politeness of Eastern protocol in the discussion of the chieftain’s price for Wassmuss.

He went as far as insisting to see the Governor at the Persian provincial capital of Shiraz to formally protest his lost luggage and demand its return.

He returned to Bushehr in 1924 and, purchasing cheap farmland, promised to repay the tribesmen from the profits he hoped to make from farming.