菲奥娜·希尔

Fiona Hill (born 1965) is a British-American academic, foreign affairs advisor and author, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Since 2023, she has also served as Chancellor of Durham University.

Appointed a defence adviser upon Labour's election to Government in July 2024, Hill was formerly an official at the U.S. National Security Council, specializing in Russian and European affairs. She was a witness in the November 2019 House hearings regarding the impeachment inquiry during the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

Hill read history and Russian at the University of St Andrews (graduating MA), then pursued postgraduate studies in history at Harvard University (taking a PhD in 1998), before being elected a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Early life and education

Fiona Hill was born in 1965 at Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in North East England, a daughter of a coal miner, Alfred Hill, and a midwife, June Murray. Her father died in 2012; her mother still lives in Bishop Auckland. In the 1960s, as many of the local coal mines were closing, her father wanted to emigrate to find work in the mines of Pennsylvania or West Virginia, but his mother's poor health required him to stay in England. He subsequently worked as a porter in a hospital.

Hill's family struggled financially. June sewed clothes for her daughters and at the age of 13, Fiona began working at odd jobs, including washing cars and working as a waitress at a local hotel. She attended Bishop Barrington School, a local comprehensive school.

She then read history and studied Russian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she obtained an MA degree in 1985. She has said the manager of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club threatened to blacklist her when she reported being sexually assaulted while waitressing during her student days in St Andrews.

In 1987, she was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, where, while interning for NBC News as a translator, she witnessed the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. She later wrote about her experiences and observations of Russian and Soviet culture in The Siberian Curse. An American professor encouraged Hill to apply for a graduate program in the United States.

At Harvard University, she graduated with an AM degree in Russian and modern history in 1991, and a PhD in history in 1998 under Richard Pipes, Akira Iriye, and Roman Szporluk. While at Harvard, Hill was a Frank Knox Fellow. Her doctoral thesis was In search of great Russia: elites, ideas, power, the state, and the pre-revolutionary past in the new Russia, 1991–1996.

Career

Early career

From 1991 to 1999, Hill worked in the research department at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 1992, she served as coordinator for a "Trilateral Study on Japanese-Russian-U.S. Relations" there and, from 1993 to 1994, she was director of the Ethnic Conflict Project.

In 1999, Hill was associate director of Harvard University's Strengthening Democratic Institutions project. She served as director of Strategic Planning for the Eurasia Foundation from 1999 to 2000.

U.S. Government service

Hill was an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006 to 2009 with the National Intelligence Council as an analyst of Russia and Eurasia.

Think tanks

Hill is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of trustees of the Eurasia Foundation.

At the Brookings Institution, Hill worked closely with Igor Danchenko. In 2010, Danchenko, Hill and Erica Downs co-authored a paper titled "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? The Realities of a Rising China and Implications for Russia's Energy Ambitions". Hill introduced Danchenko to Christopher Steele and to U.S.-based public relations executive Charles Dolan Jr., who would later become one of Danchenko's sources for the Trump–Russia dossier.

Trump administration (2017–2019)

In 2017, Hill took a leave of absence from the Brookings Institution, where she was director for the Center on the United States and Europe, while also on the National Security Council.

Hill was appointed, in the first quarter of 2017, Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on President Trump's National Security Council staff.

Hill had been due to leave the White House to return to Brookings in April 2019. She developed a close working relationship with National Security Advisor John Bolton, and at Bolton's request, Hill agreed to stay on until mid-July, after which Tim Morrison would replace her. As planned, Hill left the White House on July 15, ten days before the Trump–Zelenskyy telephone call.

Subsequently, Hill has spoken of the difficulty of maintaining a consistent U.S.-Russia policy under President Trump, a result of the clash of her "hawkish" view on Russia and Trump's intermittently warm and welcoming approach, and of the difficulty of ascertaining what Trump and Putin discussed in private meetings. Hill believed that Trump idolized Putin and fell into a trap he set at the Helsinki meeting.

Impeachment inquiry testimony

On October 14, 2019, responding to a subpoena, Hill testified in a closed-door deposition for ten hours before a committee of the United States Congress as part of the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump during his first impeachment. Some Republicans questioned the credibility of her testimony, including Connie Mack IV, who described Hill as a "George Soros mole infiltrating the national-security apparatus".