Telespazio and geoinformation in the crosshairs of Russian espionage

A career in Italian counter-espionage, a keen interest in our country’s strategic infrastructure, and a certain tendency to sow doubts and speculation about colleagues at the intelligence agencies where he worked: this is a partial profile of Gavino Raoul Piras – the 59-year-old arrested yesterday as part of an investigation by the Carabinieri’s ROS unit on charges of spying for Russia alongside another former colleague – which emerges from a series of private communications to which 24OreNextMed has had exclusive access. To try to understand who this former secret service officer, currently in custody awaiting trial, really is, one must delve into a biography with several unresolved issues, full of acronyms and roles whose meanings are vague.

According to the CV that Piras himself described to one of our sources – and which we have only partially verified, due to the obvious confidentiality surrounding these circles – Piras holds a degree in Political Science and International Relations. One of the dissertations he wrote – though it is unclear at what stage of his academic career – focused on the intelligence services of the Russian Federation. In 1998, aged 31, he had already been a member for some time of the Second Information and Security Department, known as the ‘II RIS’, a military intelligence department reporting directly to the Defence General Staff, which works in close collaboration with the AISE (the external intelligence agency) and operates mainly in high-risk areas where Italian military personnel are deployed or in war zones. All the offices of Italian defence attachés stationed at the various Italian embassies and consulates around the world, as well as at the representative offices of NATO, SHAPE (the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) and the OSCE, report to this department. It is unclear whether, during his time at the II RIS, Piras undertook missions abroad, or in which countries, but he certainly took part in setting up the C/I, the unit responsible for counter-intelligence – a specialism which, as we shall see, Piras would draw upon in the future. A few years later, Gavino Raoul Piras moved to the most renowned intelligence agencies, reporting directly to the Prime Minister’s Office, and worked for the AISE (the foreign intelligence services) but, above all, for the AISI (the domestic intelligence agency), where he was solely responsible for one task: counter-espionage. Piras remained at the AISI until August 2012, at the age of forty-five, at which point he appears to have gone into private practice. He claims to have secured a role as a private consultant for the government of an unspecified Gulf state, possibly Qatar, but at least one aspect of his departure from the domestic intelligence agency remains unclear.

In a note written by Piras in June 2023, which we have had the opportunity to read, the former agent uses polemical and vitriolic language towards a former superior of his, the former head of the AISI’s counter-espionage department. According to Piras, this former senior official lied about his qualifications to secure promotion from a peripheral post to the position of director of counter-espionage, and acted with such naivety that, within the AISI, his surname had become synonymous with mistakes and failures. Were it not a matter of national security, this might seem like trivial office gossip, peppered with professional envy and jealousy, but the affair takes on a particularly serious tone when Piras accuses his former superior of having created a ‘major problem’ for the AISI by having an AISE agent arrested – one who was ‘particularly renowned for his high level of professionalism in the field of Russian counter-espionage’ – on charges of collusion with a hostile power. The agent in question was immediately acquitted, but the timing of the operation does not appear to be coincidental: it all took place in 2012, a few months before Piras left. Did Piras leave the AISI out of resentment towards his former director – a personal matter which he continues to talk about more than ten years on? And how far might he have gone in his desire for revenge?

After leaving the AISI, in addition to his alleged consultancy work for a Gulf monarchy, Piras wrote numerous articles for a number of intelligence websites, one of which is now closed, whilst the other focuses primarily on threats to infrastructure and conferences on chemical, bacteriological and nuclear risks. Some of the articles are signed simply with the pseudonym ‘Kevin’. Towards the end of 2025, precisely at the time when the Carabinieri were intercepting one of his meetings with Mikhail Asthakov – the Russian agent who was hiding behind the diplomatic immunity afforded by his post at the Russian Federation’s Embassy in Rome – Piras sent further messages to some of his contacts which, curiously, aligned with Moscow’s narrative on various events. Piras, for example, complains about the lack of coverage in the Italian media of the arrest of Serhiy Kuznetsov, the Ukrainian agent accused by Germany of orchestrating the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipeline, who was apprehended near Rimini the previous August. Piras also claims that an MI6 agent was present in Kuznetsov’s vicinity at the time of his arrest, alluding to British involvement in the Nord Stream operation – one of the Kremlin’s key propaganda talking points. If Gavino Raoul Piras was indeed recruited by the GRU – the Russian military intelligence service – as the charges suggest, his interest in Italy’s strategic infrastructure could take on a particularly sinister dimension. According to our sources, in particular, one of his military contacts – who is still on active duty and is now under investigation as part of the probe – took part in a number of forums organised by Telespazio S.p.A. – the company, in which Leonardo and Thales hold stakes, is one of the world’s leading operators in the field of satellite services and geoinformation – and in confidential events organised by a major Italian IT firm, which also provides services to the State Police. So it is not just a matter of the Grifo and Aster missile systems or personnel files of the Italian Armed Forces, but perhaps something even more complex.