Brigadier Sir Richard Gambier-Parry, KCMG (20 January 1894 – 19 June 1965) was a British military officer who served in both the army and the air force during World War I.

During the war, he was also recruited by the Director of British Naval Intelligence to serve as the radio consultant for Operation Tracer in Gibraltar.

[1][3][4] Other notable relatives included his uncles, composer Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848 – 1918)[1][3][5] and Major Ernest Gambier-Parry (1853 – 1936).

[16] On 1 August 1925, the Captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers relinquished his temporary commission as Flight Lieutenant upon return to Army duty.

[1] In April 1938, prior to the onset of the Second World War, Gambier-Parry was recruited by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

As the head of Section VIII, Gambier-Parry, the Controller Special Communications (CSC), was charged with assembling a covert wireless network that would connect the UK with their stations on the European Continent.

[1] Nonetheless, in 1940 he was one of the triumvirate of senior SIS officers who devised the British resistance network, linked by powerful wireless sets.

That facility served in a number of capacities, the most critical the sending of Ultra intelligence from Bletchley Park to officers in the field.

[22] At the time that France fell to the Axis Powers in June 1940, only a small number of SIS agents were in communication with Whaddon Hall.

Early in the war, until about 1941, inexperienced SIS agents on the European continent spent too much time on the air, and jeopardised their security.

"In the world of neurotic policemen and timid placemen who rule the secret service, he moves like Falstaff, or some figure from Balzac, if not Rabelais.

"[24] In 1941, Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, the Director of British Naval Intelligence, chose Colonel Gambier-Parry as his radio consultant for Operation Tracer, a highly classified, military operation in which a team sealed in a clandestine observation post was to monitor enemy vessels should Gibraltar fall to the Axis Powers.

The covert complex (diagrams pictured left and right) was excavated in the existing tunnel system of Lord Airey's Shelter in the Rock of Gibraltar.

A small radio room contained the equipment for wireless communications, which included a Mark 3 transmitter and an HRO Receiver.

[28] He ran a network of secret listening stations after the war,[22] and was appointed Director of Communications at Hanslope Park, in the Borough of Milton Keynes.