Fernand Pauriol

Pauriol was born into a poor family of working class trades people. His father was a carpenter. As a child, he attended an upper primary school for boys in Aix-en-Provence. As a young man, Pauriol enrolled in the hydrography school in Marseille as a merchant marine cadet to train as a student sailing officer, with the aim of becoming a long distance captain. However, he had to leave his studies due to the cost. After leaving the school, Pauriol found a job as an accountant at the Marseille-based shipping company Compagnie Fraissinet. In 1930, he resumed his studies at the hydrography school and was certified a radio telegraphist in 1931. Under his father's influence, Pauriol took an interest in politics, particularly communist politics. In 1921, his father been a member of the French Section of the Workers' International before moving to the French communist party (PCF). His father represented the PCF in the cantonal elections of October 1934. In 1930, Pauriol joined the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France, a political youth organisation of France that was close to the PCF. He spent a year in that communist youth organisation before joining the PCF itself as a fully fledged communist. ==Career==

Pauriol began his career in radio telegraphy working for several months in the water and forestry service (Eaux et Forêts). In 1932, he was appointed to the position of coastal radio telegraphist sailor at the Compagnie Paquet shipping company in 1932, in a position he held until 1935. At the beginning of 1936, he was ordered to move to Marseille to provide the local SRI organisation a new orientation. development of the Thaelmann campaign, support of strikers, workers arrested in protest struggles, assistance of proscribed anti-fascists." In 1937, Pauriol talents as a journalist led François Billoux to appoint him as editor-in-chief of "Rouge-Midi". The next day, he represented the central committee of the PCF at the departmental conference of the SRI. Representatives of the Popular Front organizations were invited to the conference. ==World War II==

At the beginning of the war, the communist parties in Europe needed to continue communications with parties in the Soviet Union, for example the Communist International (Comintern) and in this respect the PCF was no different. In 1938, Pauriol was evaluated twice by the executive committee of the PCF to prove his electrical engineering and radio telegraphist skills were up to par. In April 1942, Pauriol constructed a radio transmitter that was used by Hersch and Miriam Sokol to provide a link to London for Trepper to transmit intelligence from an apartment in Maisons-Laffitte. The cipher clerk was Vera Ackermann. At the time this was only link between the Rote Kapelle in France and the Soviet Union. who informed him that she had first been visited by Abraham Rajchmann and then later Hillel Katz. On both occasions, she had pretended she did not know them. The meeting with Moussier had been arranged by Gestapo officer Karl Giering of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle and was part of a German Funkspiel operation. Trepper was in custody of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle. Ostensibly the operation was to prove to Soviet intelligence that he was still free and enable the Funkspiel operation to continue, otherwise he would likely have been executed but in reality it was an operation by Trepper to pass a message to the PCF that confirmed the espionage network had collapsed. Trepper had instructed Moussier not to recognise anybody from the Trepper network except himself. In early June 1943, Trepper met Moussier and passed a message from Giering, supposedly from Trepper to inform Soviet Intelligence that the French Rote Kapelle was still functioning, as well his own report and a letter instructing Duclos to send the report to Soviet intelligence as soon as possible. After the meeting, Moussier went into hiding. During the summer Pauriol visited Moussier and her husband Milo in Beugne l'Abbe, west of Luçon and arranged for the couple to disappear. On 7 July 1943 the first part of the message was transmitted to Soviet intelligence by Jacques Duclos. The second part followed on 10 July. ==Arrest==

Giering knew about the existence of Pauriol from the V-Mann Abraham Rajchmann. When Moussier disappeared, he ordered the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle to search for Pauriol all over France, but months past and there was no sign of him. Giering decided to adopt another approach and used the Funkspiel to request Soviet intelligence send them the name of a radio technician to repair Trepper's malfunctioning radio transmitter. He was arrested by the Sonderkommando on 13 August 1943 during a meeting with Vayssairat and taken to Fresnes Prison. Pauriol was tortured for three weeks but choose to remain silent before eventually exposing his own identity as Pauriol. However, he never exposed any information on the Rote Kapelle or the PCF. The Sonderkommando discovered six storage locations in different areas of Paris during the investigation of Pauriol, with the main one located in a house in Longjumeau that contained all the modern equipment necessary to build radio transmitters. ==Death==

On 19 January 1944, Pauriol was sentenced to death at a Luftwaffe court martial held in Paris by Judge Advocate Manfred Roeder. ==Notes==