THE HUSBAND of presidential candidate Sen. Grace Poe Llamanzares renounced his American citizenship early this April, starting an expatriation process that could extend until after the May 9 elections.

The senator disclosed her husband’s renunciation of his US citizenship in reply to a question during the third and final presidential debate last Sunday in Dagupan City.

Poe’s revelation may have eased the pressure on her to explain her and her family members’ citizenship and allegiance, but her husband Teodoro Misael Daniel Vera Llamanzares (nicknamed Neil) is likely to be still an American on Election Day.

His having started the process, however, is an improvement over the option announced in an interview last November with PhilSTAR editors and writers for Neil to renounce his US citizenship if his wife is elected president – a statement that labeled them as “segurista.”

Under the US Immigration and Nationality Act, an American abroad who wants to formally renounce his citizenship must do it before a consular officer in the nearest US embassy.

In an affidavit sworn to last April 7 before the barangay chairman of Greenhills in San Juan, Llamanzares said: “I… expressly and voluntarily renounce my United States nationality/American citizenship, together with all rights and privileges and all duties and allegiance.”

He also signed an Oath of Allegiance to the Philippines. The two acts could be enough reason for him to be stripped of his US citizenship acquired at birth.

But from the US point of view, the prospective expatriate has to perform a formal renunciation at the US embassy — as what senator Poe had to do in July 2011 in a process that was approved by the State department only after seven months in February 2012, or two years after she was sworn in as chair of the movie and radio-TV classification board.

While his wife campaigns for the presidency, Neil can now claim that he has started (although not yet completed) the expatriation process. How voters will judge his intentions remains to be seen.

But if Llamanzares’ wife loses her presidential bid in May, will he still continue with his expatriation and total loss of US citizenship and all rights and privileges attached to it? He or his wife, the candidate, may want to answer this question.

■ Neil’s work with US spy net bared

THE CONSTITUTION says in Section 5, Article IV (Citizenship): “Dual allegiance of citizens is inimical to the national interest and shall be dealt with by law.”

In the context of Section 5, Poe and her husband might want to comment on an April 19 article by Perry Diaz in Global Balita asking “Who is Neil Llamanzares?” We are reprinting here some excerpts (edited to fit space) to reiterate the question:

“Neil, who had held a top secret job in the United States, (would) be expected to avoid publicity, let alone people spying into his background. That would certainly make him uneasy because his former employer, Scientific Applications International Corp. (SAIC), happens to be a spy outfit.

“SAIC has a symbiotic relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). For years, SAIC was NSA’s largest contractor, earning the nickname ‘NSA West’ inside the intelligence community. Would it be accurate to classify Neil as a ‘spy’ when he worked for SAIC?

“According to the article ‘Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow,’ published in Vanity Fair on Feb. 6, 2007, SAIC is the biggest and most powerful of the government contractors. At that time, SAIC had 9,000 government contracts, many of which involved secret intelligence work; hence, it was called a ‘stealth company.’ It had 44,000 employees at that time and took in $8 billion the previous year, including a lot of the ‘expertise’ behind the Iraq War.

“Open Source Investigations (OSI) –comprised of investigative journalists, researchers, analysts, and fact-checkers – said that SAIC is the largest private intelligence service in the world.

■ Research opens a can of worms

“NEIL’S connection to America’s intelligence community surfaced when a De La Salle professor, Antonio Contreras, checked Llamanzares’ background. It turned out that SAIC is a ‘body shop’ that provides expertise to the intelligence agencies in weapons, homeland security, surveillance, computer systems, information dominance, and information warfare.

“Neil worked for SAIC as an ‘Area Manager/Systems Architect’ from November 2004 to April 2006. He was assigned to the US intelligence agencies, e.g., NSA, CIA, DIA.

“OSI had posted on its website: In the verified answer submitted to the (Philippines’) Senate Electoral Tribunal, Grace Poe said that she returned to the Philippines in May 2005 while her husband ‘stayed in the US to finish pending projects and to arrange for the sale of the family home there’.

“Neil did stay in the US until May 2006. He did sell their million-dollar mansion. And he did have very important projects to finish. But both Grace and her husband kept the nature of those important projects secret. That is because the presidential candidate’s husband is a former US Intelligence contractor.

“The following are some of the projects that OSI identified as within the scope of Neil’s employment with SAIC:

• NSA’s Trailblazer – a new computer system able to store, sort and give meaning to the massive volume of telephone, e-mail, and other electronic communications that the NSA intercepts worldwide (including in the Philippines).

• DIA and CIA’s Office of Strategic Influence – a program designed to feed disinformation to the foreign press (including to the press in the Philippines).

• DIA’s Joint Intelligence Operation Center – a worldwide group of joint intelligence organizations that gather, interpret, and act on information collected by the DIA and its sister agencies, NSA, NGA, and NRO (including from the Philippines).

“Prior to Neil’s employment at SAIC, he served in the US Air Force from 1988 to 1992. When Neil married Grace Poe in the Philippines in 1991, the couple moved to America where Neil was then on active duty in the USAF.

“But these facts were contrary to what Grace had told Filipino-Americans in Los Angeles on June 14, 2014. She talked about her ‘immigrant life in the US.’ She claimed that her husband got a job in the US and decided to live as immigrants in America where ‘opportunities are limitless for those who work hard.’”