Geoffrey Wheeler (historian)
British spy and historian
Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Edleston Wheeler CIE CBE (22 June 1897 – 1 February 1990) was a British soldier and an historian of Central Asia.
Life
Geoffrey Edleston Wheeler was born in Bromley, Kent, England to Owen Wheeler, a Captain Army Reserve Officer, and his wife Eugenie. Wheeler followed in the footsteps of his father, an infantry officer, and was commissioned into the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment in 1915 as a second lieutenant, and he reached the rank of captain before the end of the war. In 1918 he transferred to the Indian army. He initially served in the 1/6th Gurkha Rifles, and later in the 7th Rajput Regiment. From 1919 to 1925 he was attached to General Staff as an intelligence officer covering India, Palestine and Malta.
In 1926 Wheeler served in Mashhad, Iran as the British Military Attaché and he was stationed in Iraq from 1928 to 1931. Wheeler spent the next decade and a half in India where he served in the External Affairs Department, the Ministry of Information and General Staff Army Headquarters.
In 1946 Wheeler was stationed at the British embassy Teheran, Iran (1946–1953), where he served as both the Press and Oriental Councillor until he returned to London in 1950.
He retired from the Indian Army in 1949 as a Lieutenant-Colonel.
“Geoffrey Wheeler (historian)” enters the record as british spy and historian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Geoffrey, Wheeler and historian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5534965. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1897, 1990, 1915 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Geoffrey Wheeler (historian)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.