Richard L. Armitage, who served because the No. 2 official on the State Division from 2001 to 2005, through the turbulent period of the 9/11 assaults and the beginning of America’s retaliatory wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on Sunday. He was 79.
The trigger was a pulmonary embolism, Armitage Worldwide, a consulting firm that Mr. Armitage ran in Arlington, Va., stated in an announcement. The assertion didn’t say the place he died.
Mr. Armitage was the unnamed supply of a 2003 information account disclosing the id of a secret Central Intelligence Company operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. The George W. Bush administration had made the case for warfare based mostly on exaggerated claims that the nation was tied to the assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, and harbored weapons of mass destruction.
Ms. Wilson was publicly named per week after her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an opinion column in The New York Instances accusing President Bush of misleadingly claiming that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.
Mr. Wilson, a former state division official, accused the Bush administration of outing his spouse in retaliation for his criticism.
Per week after Mr. Wilson’s article was revealed, the conservative columnist Robert Novak revealed Ms. Wilson’s identify, which was labeled, setting off a political scandal and an investigation by a particular prosecutor into the supply of the leak.
Mr. Armitage, who cooperated with the investigation, publicly revealed three years later that he had been the supply. He stated the disclosure was inadvertent, and he provided his apologies to former colleagues and to the Wilsons. No prison expenses have been introduced over the leak, though I. Lewis Libby Jr., an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of mendacity to investigators.
“It was a horrible error on my half,” Mr. Armitage stated in an interview with The Instances in 2006. “There wasn’t a day after I didn’t really feel like I had let down the president, the secretary of state, my colleagues, my household and the Wilsons.”
Mr. Armitage, a 1967 graduate of america Naval Academy who noticed motion in Vietnam, served in senior roles within the State and Protection Departments through the Reagan administration. Within the 2000 election, he suggested the inexperienced Mr. Bush as a part of a gaggle that known as itself “the Vulcans” — hawkish overseas coverage insiders from earlier Republican administrations.
Condoleezza Rice, a frontrunner of the group, grew to become Mr. Bush’s nationwide safety adviser. Mr. Armitage was confirmed by the Senate because the deputy secretary of state underneath Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Following the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults, when the Vulcans, who additionally included Mr. Cheney and Protection Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, led the aggressive American response, Mr. Armitage spoke with a Pakistani normal, in search of help in what would turn out to be an American-led warfare on terror.
The president of Pakistani, Pervez Musharraf, later instructed the CBS Information program “60 Minutes” that Mr. Armitage had threatened to bomb his nation “again to the Stone Age” if it didn’t help america. Mr. Armitage denied that he had threatened navy motion towards Pakistan.
He provided his resignation from the State Division in November 2004, a day after Mr. Powell introduced he would step down, fulfilling an settlement with President Bush that he would serve solely 4 years because the nation’s chief diplomat. Mr. Armitage formally departed in February 2005 and entered the personal sector.
Richard Lee Armitage was born on April 26, 1945, in Wellesley, Mass.
Following his commencement from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, he served on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. He then volunteered to function an adviser to Vietnamese forces, and he grew to become acquainted with Vietnamese throughout three excursions with Vietnamese troops. He earned a Bronze Star.
After the autumn of Saigon in 1975, Mr. Armitage led a flotilla of 30,000 Vietnamese evacuees to protected harbor within the Philippines, in response to a Naval Academy biography.
He was a overseas coverage adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan after which served as an assistant secretary for protection for East Asia and the Pacific. In 1983, he grew to become assistant secretary of protection for safety coverage.
Beneath President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Armitage served as an envoy to East European states after the autumn of the Soviet Union. He based Armitage Worldwide after leaving authorities in 2005 and ran it till his loss of life.
His survivors embrace his spouse, Laura (Samford) Armitage, and their eight youngsters.
Within the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Armitage endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump. 4 years later, he was one among greater than 130 former Republican nationwide safety officers who signed an announcement calling Mr. Trump “dangerously unfit” to serve a second time period. He endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. within the 2020 race.
