Richard Lee Armitage (April 26, 1945 – April 13, 2025) was an American diplomat and government official. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Armitage served as a U.S. Navy officer in three combat tours of duty in the Vietnam War as a riverine warfare advisor. After leaving active duty, he served in a number of civil-service roles under Republican administrations. He worked as an aide to Senator Bob Dole before serving in various posts in the Defense Department and State Department.Remarks to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations: Richard L. Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State, Marc Susser, Historian of the State Department, Washington, DC, June 5, 2003.
During the Reagan administration, Armitage was deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and Pacific affairs (1981–1983) and assistant secretary of defense for International security affairs (1983–1989). He served in the George H. W. Bush administration in various diplomatic posts, including presidential special negotiator for the Philippines Military Bases Agreement, special mediator for water in the Middle East, special emissary to King Hussein of Jordan during the Gulf War, and director of U.S. aid to the post-Soviet states. He then worked in the private sector before joining the George W. Bush administration as deputy secretary of state, holding the post from March 2001 to February 2005.Richard Lee Armitage (1945–), Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State.
Armitage's tenure at the State Department under Secretary Colin Powell became overshadowed by the Plame affair. Armitage acknowledged in 2006 that he leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a CIA operative to columnist Robert Novak, who revealed her identity in a July 2003 column; Armitage claimed that the leak was inadvertent, said that this was a "terrible error on my part," and issued an apology.
Early life and military career Armitage was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth H. and Leo Holmes Armitage. He grew up in Atlanta, and graduated from St. Pius X Catholic High School there in 1963. In 1967, he graduated from the United States Naval Academy.
He served on a destroyer stationed off the coast of Vietnam during the Vietnam War before volunteering to serve what would eventually become three combat tours with the riverine/advisory forces for the Republic of Vietnam Navy (RVNN). According to Captain Kiem Do, an RVNN officer who served with him in Vietnam, Armitage "seemed drawn like a moth to flame to the hotspots of the naval war: bedding down on the ground with Vietnamese commandos, sharing their rations and hot sauce, telling jokes in flawless Vietnamese".Do Kiem and Julie Kane, Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer's War, , 1998, p. 164 Instead of a Naval uniform, Armitage often dressed in native garb. He adopted a Vietnamese pseudonym, "Tran Phu", which loosely translated meant "rich Navy guy".
Several associates who fought alongside Armitage and other politicians (including Ted Shackley)Mann, James 2004. Rise of the Vulcans Viking Press , page 42 have since claimed that Armitage was associated with the CIA's clandestine Phoenix Program. Armitage denied a role in Phoenix and stated that at most, CIA officers would occasionally ask him for intelligence reports.James Mann, 2004. Rise of the Vulcans Viking Press ; p. 43
In 1973, Armitage left active duty and joined the Defense Attaché Office, Saigon. Immediately prior to the fall of Saigon, he organized and led the removal of RVNN ships and personnel from the country and out of the hands of the approaching North Vietnamese. Armitage told RVNN officers to take their ships to a designated place in the ocean where they would be rescued by U.S. forces and their ships destroyed. When Armitage arrived at the designated location, he found 30 RVNN ships and dozens of fishing boats and cargo ships with as many as 30,000 Vietnamese refugees.Mann, James 2004. Rise of the Vulcans Viking Press . p. 52. With transportation options limited for removing the floating city, Armitage, aboard the destroyer escort , personally decided to lead the flotilla of ships over to shelter in Subic Bay, Philippines. This went against the wishes of both the Philippine and U.S. governments. Nevertheless, Armitage personally arranged for food and water to be delivered by the U.S. Defense Department before negotiating with both governments for permission to dock in Subic Bay.
Armitage was the recipient of several military decorations, including a Bronze Star with Combat V, Navy Commendation Medal with Combat V, and Navy Achievement Medal with Combat V.
Public service career Armitage served as an aide to Republican Senator Bob Dole. During the Ronald Reagan administration, he served from 1981 to 1983 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Security Affairs for East Asia and the Pacific and became Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs on June 9, 1983, serving in that position for the next eight and a half years. Armitage was nominated by President George H. W. Bush in April 1989 to serve as Secretary of the Army under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, but the nomination was withdrawn the following month at Armitage's request, who cited a desire to spend more time with his large family.
Working with NGOs like the Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoner Association, Armitage played a role in facilitating the emigration of thousands of families of former Republic of Vietnam military and civil officials to the United States.
During the Gulf War, Bush appointed Armitage as a special emissary to King Hussein of Jordan. From March 1992 to May 1993, Armitage was posted to Europe to lead U.S. foreign aid efforts to the newly independent post-Soviet states, and held the personal rank of ambassador.
After leaving the government, Armitage joined the private sector as director of U.S. data aggregation firm ChoicePoint.
Christic Institute, Khun Sa, and misconduct allegations In 1986, Armitage was named in an affidavit filed in a civil lawsuit by the Christic Institute as part of a conspiracy responsible for the La Penca bombing, and a number of other covert operations. The affidavit, by Christic's lead attorney Daniel Sheehan, alleged that Armitage was involved with heroin smuggling from southeast Asia to fund covert activities in South America. He and Ted Shackley were reported to be directly responsible for the Iran Contra Scandal.
Similar charges were made in a 1987 letter from the Burmese warlord Khun Sa to the U.S. Justice Department. The letter, which was transmitted by James "Bo" Gritz, accused Armitage of organizing heroin smuggling from the Golden Triangle in the 1960s and 70s. Upon returning to the United States with this information, a key witness, Lance Trimmer, was held by the CIA in Oklahoma for a period of time. He was released five minutes after the hearing ended in Las Vegas.House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hearings of July 30 and July 15, 1987
Armitage rebutted the charges from Sheehan and Khun Sa, observing that at dates he was said to be in Thailand, he was living in Washington D.C., working as an assistant to Senator Robert Dole.
In 1988, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed the Christic suit, after finding it to be frivolous and ordered the Institute to pay $955,000 in attorneys fees and $79,500 in court costs. The ruling was subsequently upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States.
In 1984, Armitage wrote a positive character reference using Pentagon stationary for Nguyet Thi O'Rourke, a Vietnamese immigrant convicted of running an illegal gambling operation in Virginia. Ross Perot, a political opponent of George H. W. Bush, alleged that Armitage had written this character reference to conceal an extramarital affair between the two. Armitage would later concede using Pentagon stationary was “dumb,” but denied doing anything illegal or improper.
Bush administration
In 1998, Armitage signed a letter to President Bill Clinton urging Clinton to target the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power in Iraq. It stated that Saddam's massive violations of the cease-fire that had ended the Gulf War has caused erosion of the Gulf War coalition's containment policy. It also raised the possibility that Iraq, emboldened by Western inaction, might re-develop weapons of mass destruction.
During the 2000 Presidential election campaign, he served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice that called itself The Vulcans.Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice Simon & Schuster, New York, 2009, p. 170 The United States Senate confirmed him as deputy secretary of state on March 23, 2001; he was sworn in three days later. A close associate of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Armitage was regarded, along with Powell, as a moderate within the presidential administration of George W. Bush.
Armitage tendered his resignation on November 16, 2004 to accompany Powell, who announced his resignation as Secretary of State the day before. He left the post on February 22, 2005, when Robert Zoellick succeeded to the office.
Role in Plame affair The Plame affair was a political scandal concerning the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert intelligence operative during the Bush administration in 2003. An American syndicated columnist and conservative pundit, Robert Novak, had learned of her employment by the CIA from Armitage, who was then working for the State Department, and Novak had publicly identified her as the source of a recommendation given to the President in the course of her duties. Plame had to resign from the CIA because her identity was no longer secret. A criminal investigation into the revelation produced no charges against Armitage, but several charges against Scooter Libby, an assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney, for lying to the investigators about the matter. Libby was convicted, but his jail sentence was ultimately commuted by Bush, and he was subsequently pardoned by President Donald Trump on April 13, 2018.
Armitage's defense that he had inadvertently made an off-hand remark during a probing interview with Novak, coupled with his candor and cooperation, was accepted, although the decision not to prosecute was not made until 2006. Meanwhile, the long and slow investigation played out in the press as a scandal, "the Plame Affair" or "Plamegate".
On November 15, 2005, journalist Bob Woodward of The Washington Post revealed in an article that "a government official with no axe to grind" leaked to him the identity of Valerie Plame in mid-June 2003. According to an April 2006 Vanity Fair article (published March 14, 2006), former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee said in an interview "that Armitage is the likely source is a fair assumption", though Bradlee later told the Post that he "[did] not recall making that precise statement" in the interview. The following year, on March 2, 2006, bloggers discovered that "Richard Armitage" fit the spacing on a redacted court document, suggesting he was a source for the Plame leak. In August 2006, the Associated Press published a story that revealed Armitage met with Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003. The information came from official State Department calendars provided to the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.
Novak, in an August 27, 2006 appearance on Meet the Press, stated that although he still would not release the name of his source, he felt it was long overdue that the source reveal himself. He had reason to think that the source might do that. Armitage had reportedly been a cooperative and key witness in the investigation. According to The Washington Note, Armitage had testified before the grand jury three times.