GSA executive with top-secret clearance didn’t disclose China trip, past felonies

Spies may have hacked his phone

Top General Services Administration officials learned of a troubling discovery by the agency’s watchdog office back in December: a GSA executive responsible for intelligence agency customers had gone to China a year earlier without telling anyone.

The official not only held a top-secret compartmented information clearance that required him to report the trip, he failed to disclose decades-old felony arrests or report multiple contacts with foreign nationals, according to a Dec. 6, 2013, memo from the GSA Office of Inspector General to the agency’s top acquisition and human resources officials.

There was more: The GSA employee misused a government travel card, made false statements on ethics and national security forms and failed to disclose an airplane he owned as an asset in a 2008 bankruptcy case, among other serious misconduct findings.

The investigation ended quietly without criminal charges late last year when the Justice Department declined to prosecute, according to the memo, which The Washington Times obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. While the document was redacted to withhold the name of the official, The Times has confirmed he is Norman Wear, a GSA employee since the 1980s who earned $136,000 in fiscal 2013 working in the agency’s Office of Customer Accounts and Research — the point of contact for other federal agencies that use GSA contracts. Mr. Wear was the point man for U.S. intelligence agencies.

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