Richard L. Armitage, who served as the No. 2 official at the State Department from 2001 to 2005, during the turbulent era of the 9/11 attacks and the start of America’s retaliatory wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on Sunday. He was 79.
The cause was a pulmonary embolism, Armitage International, a consulting company that Mr. Armitage ran in Arlington, Va., said in a statement. The statement did not say where he died.
Mr. Armitage was the unnamed source of a 2003 news account disclosing the identity of a secret Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. The George W. Bush administration had made the case for war based on exaggerated claims that the country was tied to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and harbored weapons of mass destruction.
Ms. Wilson was publicly named a week after her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an opinion column in The New York Times accusing President Bush of misleadingly claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.
Mr. Wilson, a former state department official, accused the Bush administration of outing his wife in retaliation for his criticism.
A week after Mr. Wilson’s article was published, the conservative columnist Robert Novak revealed Ms. Wilson’s name, which was classified, setting off a political scandal and an investigation by a special prosecutor into the source of the leak.
Mr. Armitage, who cooperated with the investigation, publicly revealed three years later that he had been the source. He said the disclosure was inadvertent, and he offered his apologies to former colleagues and to the Wilsons. No criminal charges were brought over the leak, although I. Lewis Libby Jr., an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of lying to investigators.
“It was a terrible error on my part,” Mr. Armitage said in an interview with The Times in 2006. “There wasn’t a day when I didn’t feel like I had let down the president, the secretary of state, my colleagues, my family and the Wilsons.”
Mr. Armitage, a 1967 graduate of the United States Naval Academy who saw action in Vietnam, served in senior roles in the State and Defense Departments during the Reagan administration. In the 2000 election, he advised the inexperienced Mr. Bush as part of a group that called itself “the Vulcans” — hawkish foreign policy insiders from earlier Republican administrations.
Condoleezza Rice, a leader of the group, became Mr. Bush’s national security adviser. Mr. Armitage was confirmed by the Senate as the deputy secretary of state under Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the Vulcans, who also included Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, led the aggressive American response, Mr. Armitage spoke with a Pakistani general, seeking support in what would become an American-led war on terror.
The president of Pakistani, Pervez Musharraf, later told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” that Mr. Armitage had threatened to bomb his country “back to the Stone Age” if it didn’t support the United States. Mr. Armitage denied that he had threatened military action against Pakistan.
He offered his resignation from the State Department in November 2004, a day after Mr. Powell announced he would step down, fulfilling an agreement with President Bush that he would serve only four years as the nation’s chief diplomat. Mr. Armitage officially departed in February 2005 and entered the private sector.
Richard Lee Armitage was born on April 26, 1945, in Wellesley, Mass.
Following his graduation from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, he served on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. He then volunteered to serve as an adviser to Vietnamese forces, and he became conversant in Vietnamese during three tours with Vietnamese troops. He earned a Bronze Star.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Mr. Armitage led a flotilla of 30,000 Vietnamese evacuees to safe harbor in the Philippines, according to a Naval Academy biography.
He was a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan and then served as an assistant secretary for defense for East Asia and the Pacific. In 1983, he became assistant secretary of defense for security policy.
Under President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Armitage served as an ambassador to East European states after the fall of the Soviet Union. He founded Armitage International after leaving government in 2005 and ran it until his death.
His survivors include his wife, Laura (Samford) Armitage, and their eight children.
In the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Armitage endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump. Four years later, he was one of more than 130 former Republican national security officials who signed a statement calling Mr. Trump “dangerously unfit” to serve a second term. He endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 race.
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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