Eighteen months ago, John Dullahan was an intelligence analyst with a long and varied career in both the military and the classified world. Today, he is jobless and blacklisted from the federal workforce, his loyalty to the United States, he says, brought into question. He just isn't sure why.
On St. Patrick's Day 2009, the government stripped the Irish-born Dullahan's security clearance and fired him from his job at the Defense Intelligence Agency in a manner that has no precedent at the Pentagon - invoking a national security clause that states that it would harm the interests of the United States to inform him of the accusations against him.
As a result, Dullahan, a Vietnam veteran who served at military posts around the world and as a U.N. weapons inspector in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, cannot appeal to a board of senior agency officials, as others in his position might. He is, in effect, stranded.
"This has been devastating for me," said Dullahan, 65, who became a U.S. citizen in 1973. "I am a loyal American."
Security clearances are a ticket to opportunity for hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors. But when those clearances are taken away, so is any chance of employment in the national security complex.