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.
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.
