Wassmuss was a consular official, and in the first days of February 1915 Wassmuss and a few followers sailed a river steamer named SS "Pioneer" down the Tigris river to a point some 65 kilometers below Kut al Amara in Mesopotamia (a town about 160 kilometers southeast of Baghdad). The "Pioneer" had served both the Turks and Royal Navy in the war. 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. Britain had outposts in Persia and Kuwait to protect its interests in India. Also, oil from the Persian Gulf began to flow to Britain from a new refinery and port at Abadan. Kut was later the site of a strategic battle, where the British general Townsend and his British and Indian army were besieged and defeated by the Ottoman Turks with German Army assistance.