Richard L. Armitage, which was the official n. 2 at the State Department from 2001 to 2005, during the turbulent era of the attacks of 11 September and the beginning of the American retaliation wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on Sunday. He was 79 years old.
The cause was a pulmonary embolism, Armitage International, a consultancy company that Mr. Armitage managed in Arlington, Virginia, in a note. The statement did not say where he died.
Boat songwriting and with a shaved head, Mr. Armitage, a graduate at the Naval Academy who served in Vietnam, worked for three republican presidents in foreign policy and senior defense works, part of a crotter of decades of government officials who believed in a muscular American presence abroad.
He was one of a group, led by Condoleezza Rice, who was called “The Vulcans”, advising an inexperienced president George W. Bush on defense issues during his presidential campaign and the first term.
Mr. Armitage, however, obtained unwelcome notoriety such as the nameless source of a 2003 news account that revealed the secret identity of a central intelligence agency, Valerie Plame Wilson, shortly after the invasion of Iraq.
The Bush administration supported the war based on exaggerated statements that Iraq was linked to the attacks of 11 September 2001 and hosted weapons of mass destruction.
What became known as “Valerie Plame Affair” turned into a Washington scandal, with a complete field printing by the media and a criminal investigation by a special prosecutor.
Mrs. Wilson has taken the name publicly from her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote a column of opinion in the New York Times accusing President Bush of having misleading that Iraq had attempted to buy Uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.
Wilson, a former official of the State Department, accused the Bush administration of having released his wife in retaliation for his criticisms.
A week after the publication of Mr. Wilson’s article, the conservative editorialist Robert Novak revealed the name of Mrs. Wilson, who was classified, triggering the investigations of a special prosecutor on the source of loss.
Mr. Armitage, who collaborated with the investigations, publicly revealed three years after it was the source. He said the disclosure was involuntary and offered his apologies to former colleagues and Wilson. No criminal accusations were brought, although I. Lewis Libby Jr., helper of the vice -president Dick Cheney, was sentenced for lying to the investigators in 2007. (President Bush granted him clemency the following month.)
“It was a terrible mistake on my part,” said Armitage in an interview with the times of 2006. “There was no day when I didn’t feel like I disappointed the president, the secretary of state, my colleagues, my family and Wilson.”
Armitage’s mandate in senior roles in the state and defense departments began during the Reagan administration.
In the 2000 elections, he and other members of the Vulcans – insiders of the foreign policy of Hawkish of previous republican presidencies – joined to advise Mr. Bush, who, as the governor of Texas, was new on the national phase.
Mrs. Rice became councilor for the national security of President Bush; Colin L. Powell became secretary of state; And Mr. Armitage, one of Mr. Powell’s best friends, was confirmed by the Senate as deputy secretary.
Following the terrorist attacks of 11 September-when the Vulcans, who also included Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, led the aggressive American response-Mr. Armitage spoke with a Pakistani general, looking for support in what would become the war led by American.
The president of Pakistan, Pervez Muharraf, later told to the news program of the CBS “60 minutes” that Mr. Armitage had threatened to bomb his country “again to the era of the stone” if he did not support the United States. Mr. Armitage denied having threatened a military action against Pakistan.
He offered his resignation by the State Department in November 2004, after the re -election of President Bush, and a day after Mr. Powell announced that he was discharged, fulfilling an agreement with the president who would only serve four years as a diplomatic leader of the nation. Armitage officially started in February 2005 and entered the private sector.
In 2009, he said that the CIA waterboarding of the detainees of terrorism, that the White House Bush had approved, was wrong and a form of torture.
“I hope that if I knew it at the moment I was using, I would have had the courage to resign,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “But I don’t know. It is now with hindsight.”
Richard Lee Armitage was born on April 26, 1945 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and grew up in Atlanta. He graduated from the Catholic high school of San Pio X in 1963.
After graduating from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, in the MD, he served on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. He volunteered for servants as a councilor for the Vietnamese forces and became aware in Vietnamese during three tours with them. He gained a bronze star.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Armitage led a fleet of 30,000 Vietnamese evacuated to Safe Harbour in the Philippines, according to a biography of the Naval Academy.
He entered the government that year as a consultant of the Pentagon and later he was helper of Senator Bob Dole del Kansas.
Armitage was Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy councilor in the 1980 presidential campaign and then joined the Reagan administration as assistant secretary to defense for Eastern Asia and the Pacific. From 1983 to 1989 he was assistant secretary of defense for security policy.
Under President George HW Bush, he was an emissary of King Hussein of Jordan during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and an ambassador of the Eastern Europe states after the fall of the Soviet Union. He founded Armitage International after leaving the government in 2005 and managed him until his death.
His survivors include his wife Laura (Samford) Armitage; eight children; A brother and sister; and 12 grandchildren. He and his wife were also adopted parents of many children.
In the 2016 presidential elections, Armitage approved Hillary Clinton on Donald J. Trump. Four years later, he was one of the over 130 former republican national security officials who signed a declaration that summoned Mr. Trump “dangerously unsuitable” to serve a second term. He approved Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 race.