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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* Sic.