Fiona Hill

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.

Her 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 and her sister attended Bishop Barrington School, a local comprehensive school.

Fiona Hill (born October 1965) is a British-American foreign affairs specialist and author.

She is a former official at the U.S. National Security Council, specializing in Russian and European affairs.

Hill was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in North East England, in 1965, the daughter of a coal miner, Alfred Hill, and a midwife, June Murray.

In 1987, she was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, where, while interning for NBC News, she witnessed the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

An American professor encouraged Hill to apply for a graduate program in the United States.

She later wrote about the experience in The Siberian Curse: "I noticed that many aspects of British (and, by relation, American) culture were surprisingly, even unexpectedly similar, and that the Russians and the West had a good deal in common. Before long, other aspects of the Soviet and Russian [...] mentalities and cultures reared their heads, and these gaps seemed larger and more consuming than any novel or textbook could transmit".

Continuing in another passage, she writes: "Whether or not these gaps can be effectively bridged or, at least, mitigated will remain the guiding question for this field of study for decades to come."

At Harvard University, she earned a master's degree in Russian and modern history in 1991, and a Ph.D. 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.

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.

She earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1998.

She currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

She was installed as Chancellor of Durham University in June 2023.

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.

Hill was an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006 to 2009.

At the National Intelligence Council as a national intelligence analyst of Russia and Eurasia from 2006 to 2009.

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 called "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 Steele dossier.

Her father died in 2012; her mother still lives in Bishop Auckland.

In 2017, she recalled applying for the University of Oxford: "I applied to Oxford in the '80s and was invited to an interview. It was like a scene from Billy Elliot: people were making fun of me for my accent and the way I was dressed. It was the most embarrassing, awful experience I had ever had in my life."

She then read history and studied Russian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

She has revealed that 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 2017, she 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, by President Donald Trump as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on his National Security Council staff.

She was a witness in the November 2019 House hearings regarding the impeachment inquiry during the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

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.

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.