News of Mirza Hussein Ali’s mission had been greeted with enormous excitement by all the officials concerned with the incipient Great Game. Count Simonitch had written from the Teheran Legation urging that this opportunity should not be lost. British influence in Persia was already on the wane, he wrote. Now the chance had come to include Afghanistan in a tripartite alliance of Russia, Persia and “Kabulistan.”
