Major-General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins, KCMG, DSO, MC (2 July 1896 – 11 February 1976) was the one of the co-founders of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the Second World War. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers. Earlier in the war, while under the command of Jo Holland, Gubbins was also responsible for setting up the secret Auxiliary Units, a commando stay-behind force based around the Home Defence Scheme of Section D, to operate on the flanks and to the rear of German lines if the United Kingdom were invaded during Operation Sea Lion, Germany's planned invasion.

The Soviet double agent Kim Philby, who worked for Gubbins for some time, later wrote of Gubbins in his memoirs:

"The air of his office crackled with energy, and his speech was both friendly and mercifully brief. A friend of mine nicknamed him “Whirling Willie” after a character in a contemporary comic strip. It was rumoured that he could only find time for his girl-friends at breakfast. But he was man enough to keep them."

Gubbins sought to create a legacy where he placed himself at the center of nearly every action of the war, often claiming credit for the creations of others – such as the invention of the myth that he was the man to come up with the idea of both the Auxiliary Units and the Shetland Bus, where they were both in reality inventions of his main political rival, Laurence Grand. During the war, his contemporaries often thought of him as a difficult to work with, and some of them even went so far as to call him evil. When the newly minted Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Stewart Menzies, gained executive authority over the future of the SOE, Menzies removed Gubbins from his position and forced him to retire with the pension of a Colonel, despite the fact that he was an Acting Major General. He acted quickly upon the notion that history is written by the victors, as he was already personal friends with most of the historians who would write his story, such as M. R. D. Foot, and even himself wrote the first official narrative of the SOE in 1945. Therefore, he secured himself at the center of the story, and the stories of John Charles Francis Holland and Laurence Grand were laid aside as footnotes in Gubbins' story for decades.

Gubbins was born in Japan on 2 July 1896, the younger son and third child of John Harington Gubbins (1852–1929), Oriental Secretary at the British Legation. In the 1901 census he is shown living with his grandparents, Colin Alexander McVean and four siblings at Killiemore House on the Isle of Mull. He was educated at Cheltenham College and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich where he graduated 56th out of 70 cadets.

Gubbins was commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in 1914. On the outbreak of war he was visiting the German city of Heidelberg in order to improve his German language skills and had to make a perilous journey back to Britain via Belgium, arriving in Dover the day before Britain entered the conflict. Gubbins served as a battery officer on the Western Front – initially with the 126th Battery as part of the British Army's 3rd Corps. He first saw action on 22 May 1915 in the Second Battle of Ypres and on 9 June was promoted to lieutenant.

In July 1916 he participated in the Battle of the Somme and received the Military Cross, the citation for which, appearing in The London Gazette in September 1916, reads as follows:

For conspicuous gallantry. When one of his guns and its detachment were blown up by a heavy shell, he organised a rescue party and personally helped to dig out the wounded while shells were falling all round.