Notes containing state secrets unfurled from shirt pockets, handed out during meetings in the park, on a bench, or at a bar. Cell phones hidden in a microwave exchanged. Digital memory cards left in a crack in a street wall . And envelopes containing €4,000 in cash, the agreed-upon price for each highly classified piece of information that Gavino Raoul Piras , a 59-year-old Sardinian former intelligence agent, obtained through moles among the Defense cybersecurity military and provided to a Russian intelligence agent , who enjoys diplomatic immunity in Italy.

Piras was filmed several times by ROS investigators during his meetings with the Moscow spy. The espionage system was discovered just over a year ago, after the AISI's report, during an Italian intelligence counterintelligence operation.

He provided Russian intelligence agents with highly classified information on intelligence and weapons produced in our country. He had exclusive contact with the Russian agent . The Moscow spy asked him for the information he needed, and Piras obtained it thanks to several moles who are now under investigation in the ROS investigation.

Gavino Raoul Piras is a former member of the Italian intelligence service and a former non-commissioned officer in the Carabinieri. He described himself as an independent intelligence analyst from the end of his career, culminating in the 2012 awarding of the Legion of Merit, a U.S. military decoration typically given to members of the U.S. Army and allied nations, and bestowed upon him for his work in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His extensive resume included the production of a series of essays, such as "Theory of Information Capital" and the 2011 text "Intelligence in International Relations: The Russian Federation." Piras, a native of Sassari, also studied at the NATO school in Oberammergau, Germany, and participated in specific international exercises abroad.

A life dedicated to espionage and counterespionage, which ended yesterday with house arrest and a series of searches that also led to the discovery of twenty thousand euros in cash in the possession of one of the suspects.