Richard L. Armitage, 79, Dies; State Department Official in a Turbulent Era
While serving as Colin Powell’s deputy during the Iraq war, he found himself at the center of a scandal when he leaked a C.I.A. operative’s name.
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.
Barrel-chested and with a shaved head, Mr. Armitage, a Naval Academy graduate who served in Vietnam, worked for three Republican presidents in senior foreign policy and defense jobs, part of a decades-spanning coterie of government officials who believed in a muscular American presence abroad.
He was one of a group, led by Condoleezza Rice, who called themselves “the Vulcans,” advising an inexperienced President George W. Bush on defense issues during his presidential campaign and first term.
Mr. Armitage, however, achieved unwelcome notoriety as the unnamed source of a 2003 news account that revealed the secret identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, shortly after the invasion of Iraq.
The Bush administration made the case for war based on exaggerated claims that Iraq was tied to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and harbored weapons of mass destruction.