There is nothing for you.., p.1
There Is Nothing for You Here, page 1
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The “Improbable” Fiona Hill
From the Coal House to the White House
The Coal House
“Call the United Nations”
Grasping at the Future
Out of Your League
Common Northerner
A Divided House
The Land of Opportunity
Shock Therapy
Women’s Work
Unlucky Generations
The White House
Me the People
“Russia Bitch”
The Price of Populism
Off with Their Heads
The Horrible Year
Our House
The Great Reckoning
No More Forgotten People
No More Forgotten Places
Conclusion
Creating Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Connect on Social Media
Copyright © 2021 by Fiona Hill
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
marinerbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-358-57431-6
ISBN 978-0-358-57424-8 (ebook)
Cover design by Brian Moore
Cover photograph © Steven Beijer / EyeEm / Getty Images
Author photograph © Andrew Harnik / AP Photo
v2.0921
For Alf and June
Prologue
The “Improbable” Fiona Hill
On November 21, 2019, I walked through the door of Room 1100 of the Longworth Office Building in Washington, D.C., to appear before the House Intelligence Committee. I was there to give public testimony to the United States Congress as one of the two final fact witnesses in the hearings that preceded the first Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in January 2020. I did not know it yet, but my personal and professional lives were about to collide in front of millions of TV viewers around the world.
I had spent the previous few days huddled with my longtime friend and more recent legal counsel, Lee Wolosky, and two of his colleagues, Molly Levinson and Sam Ungar, preparing for my appearance —reviewing all the other witness depositions and the format so I would know what to expect. Lee and Molly knew the congressional hearing room well. It was cavernous and notoriously chilled. The air conditioning was cranked up and the temperature set low to accommodate congressmen in their layers of undershirts, dress shirts, and suit jackets so there would be no risk of sweaty armpits and brows beaded with perspiration.
Molly warned me that, as a more lightly dressed woman, I risked freezing. She described the phalanx of photographers and the TV cameras that would track my every move and facial expression and stressed that I would be scrutinized for the signals these inadvertently sent. I would be judged by my appearance: “You will be in the fashion section of the Washington Post,” she predicted. “You need to minimize the distractions—you want everyone to listen to what you are saying and not fixate on what you’re wearing or what you’re doing with your hands and face.” She had me practice pushing the balls of my feet into the floor to stop myself from shivering from the cold—or a combination of the cold and inevitable nerves. “This will help channel the energy out,” she said, “and keep your teeth from chattering.”
Molly told me that she would set me up with a stylist to fix my hair and face in place before the testimony, and she sent me on an expedition into my wardrobe to find an appropriate suit and accessories (if I had them). In some ways this was a familiar exercise for me. As a graduate student at Harvard University, I had traded in my ripped jeans and Doc Martens for simple business attire, after being counseled by older women that certain opportunities would be closed to me until I began to dress the part that I wanted to play in life. I thought about that advice, and about the road I had taken since, as I embarked upon this very different sartorial exercise.
I was given a list of items and instructed to lay out whatever I had in those categories on the floor and send Molly pictures. She settled on a dark blue suit and white top that I had fortuitously purchased in a sale, killing time shopping with my elderly mother while my daughter had braces fitted in October. (My mother had suddenly yelled across the store, which was next door to the orthodontist’s, “Hey, Fiona, there are some suits on sale over here—might you need one for that impeachment thingy you’re doing?” I had sprinted over to hush her up, but as it happened, I did.) Molly also selected a pair of innocuous black pumps that I almost never wore and a simple gold-plated chain and bracelet and watch that would not draw attention. She reminded me to wear a pair of panty hose to cover up the goose bumps.
This all seemed a bit over the top, and as someone who barely owned any makeup beyond some face powder and an eye pencil, I was initially taken aback and somewhat awed by the extreme prime-time makeover that came at the skilled hands of former American First Lady Michelle Obama’s one-time stylist. But Molly was right! For a woman in the spotlight, the self-presentation was ultimately as important as the substantive preparation of reading all the other depositions and watching the witnesses’ testimony as Sam took notes on the key points.
At the end of the day, as I wrapped up my testimony alongside David Holmes from the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, the Washington Post’s fashion critic gave us her verdict: “Their testimony was pointed. Their clothes were reassuringly dull.” Friends complimented me on my hair and makeup. Molly’s mission, at least, was accomplished. I had struggled against sexism throughout my professional life, in a seemingly unending effort to realize my potential and do my job effectively despite the difficulties that somehow seemed intrinsic to being female. Nonetheless, I would never have thought that I would need to worry about my gender being a liability for me—and for the country—at such a critical moment. Yet there I was.
My moment in the global spotlight came almost exactly thirty years after I left my home in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in the North East of England to embark on a scholarship to Harvard. Since first setting foot in the U.S., in 1989, I had spent three decades establishing myself as a policy expert on Russia. This led to two stints in the U.S. government under three different presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
The congressional hearings and the impeachment trial of 2019–2020 marked the culmination of decades of political polarization in the United States and several years of bitter partisan battles triggered by the contentious 2016 presidential race. They also represented a triumph for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who unleashed the Russian security services to intervene in the 2016 election.
I came into the government in early 2017 to deal with the national security consequences of this intervention. I anticipated a job behind the scenes at the National Security Council (NSC), mitigating the damage Russian operatives had done and heading off future interference. By the end of 2019, I was center stage, embroiled in partisan politics. This first impeachment trial focused on a July 25, 2019, telephone conversation between President Trump and President Zelensky of Ukraine. In the call, President Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former U.S. vice president Joe Biden, who would run against Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Ukraine was in my official portfolio. For the first time in my professional life, I became “the story.” I had to prepare an opening statement for the members of Congress to explain who I was and why I was there to answer their questions.
The impeachment of a president was a historic moment. This meant that whether I liked it or not, I was part of history. Several friends texted me to point this out. As an academically trained historian, I found the personal aspect unsettling, but history is written from the raw material of moments like this. Today’s media headlines telegraphing the significance of a current event become tomorrow’s footnotes in formal historical analysis. The life experiences of individuals who find themselves in the spotlight, by choice or by chance, shape their country’s written history. It is based on the stories we tell ourselves about what just happened, who we are, and where we come from. Life experience influences the choices people make and the actions they take. This is why so many personal stories inspire biographies. I wrote a quasi-biography of Vladimir Putin—more of a psychological portrait—to try to explain how key aspects of his life story shaped his worldview and motivated his actions as Russian president. I wrote this book, in part, because I was acutely aware of how my own early life laid the path for everything I did subsequently—even my decision to appear before Congress and my earlier choice to enter public service.
In some respects my personal story is an improbable one. I started life in the North East of England as a coal miner’s daughter. In the United States, I became a White House adviser on Russia and Europe. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college. Thanks to a combination of timing, chance encounters, and larger events, I found my way to a career in think tanks and the corridors of power. I came from a distinct economic and political geography in my homeland. My family wa
For a policy professional like me, telling personal stories is an essential way of connecting the vast majority of people, who don’t spend their time fixated on foreign affairs, to bigger issues. Stories help explain the complex dynamics behind national security dilemmas and political developments. If people can personally relate to the story, if what you have to say resonates with them, they take away some of the facts and ideas you have conveyed. You provide authenticity, not abstraction.
I learned this intellectually during my university studies, but I only really, truly appreciated it when I applied this technique to my congressional testimony and put myself and my family in the opening statement. Indeed, the personal part of my November 2019 congressional testimony generated particular interest in the United Kingdom as well as the United States. The attention took me entirely by surprise. Long-lost relatives and friends, not quite recovered from the shock of seeing “our Fiona” being interrogated by Congress, got in touch. My face was all over the nightly news and the front page of every major international newspaper.
In the United States, I trended on Twitter. I was the subject of memes on the internet. I even featured in a series of Bloom County comic strips by the celebrated American cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, wielding an ax to enforce the return of long-overdue library books. Enterprising people put my image on T-shirts and, most weirdly, on a collection of semi-religious votive candles. Over the next several weeks and months, I received hundreds of postcards and letters from across America in reaction to my statement. Some writers wanted to know how I had done it—both my congressional testimony and my career journey. Others wanted to share their own hardscrabble success stories. Many American writers bemoaned the bitter and fractured politics that paved the way to impeaching President Trump. Some thanked me and my fellow witnesses for our public service. Several letters were deeply thoughtful. They offered ideas on how America might overcome its political divisions and the pervasive sense of political alienation. A few contained small gifts—pictures and mementos. Most writers urged me to share more of my life story publicly.
Across the Atlantic, British newspaper columnists homed in on the assertion in my opening statement that my working-class background and northern English accent limited my professional prospects in the United Kingdom. They pondered the persistence of class and accent discrimination in England and the barriers they posed to career advancement. Somewhat bizarrely, they compared my unlikely professional trajectory to that of British prime minister Boris Johnson, the privileged and plummy-accented product of Eton and Oxford.
I was suddenly the “improbable” Fiona Hill (as the Financial Times put it six months later in a June 2020 feature). The newspaper articles, the comments that accompanied them online, subsequent letters to the editor, and personal letters sent directly to me posed a series of questions: Was it true that my background had held me back in the UK in the 1980s? Would it still hold me back four decades later? What did my accent say about who I was, where I was from, and what I should be? If my trajectory was so improbable, then how on earth had I made it from my obscure hometown, Bishop Auckland, to work in the White House? If I had managed to do something like this, could others have similar opportunities? Or was I just a fluke?
This book is a response to those letters and questions. They provided the impetus to interlink my personal storyline with larger political events to explain the origins and nature of America’s current crisis and try to offer solutions. Above all else, the book clarifies just how improbable my journey is today—or rather, why it is so improbable. Because in hindsight, I am a fluke. My story is the exception that proves the rule of class or socioeconomic immobility in the early twenty-first century.
This is a rule that we desperately need to change. The constraints on mobility in America today form the core of our country’s ongoing crisis, as do a similar set of problems in the United Kingdom. They mirror challenges that have dogged our historic adversary, Russia, for decades. And unless we figure out a way to solve them, Russia’s fate and its slide into authoritarianism since 2000 could well be our own.
Introduction
From the Coal House to the White House
I was born in 1965 and grew up poor as the daughter of a former coal miner in the United Kingdom’s equivalent of America’s Rust Belt, the North East of England. In the 1980s, during the period when Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister, we were the pioneers for a unique form of social and economic malaise—a decline from the heyday of the industrial era that would come to define the entire developed world. The local mines closed, along with associated manufacturing industries. Businesses were shuttered, communities gutted. Family and friends lost their way of life. Bishop Auckland, my once-prosperous hometown, was a forgotten place.
In 1984, the year I completed school, the North East of England was in a state of terminal decay. It was wracked by brutal unemployment and poverty. Almost 20 percent of the local population was registered unemployed. Others were in poorly paid jobs, barely making ends meet. Real unemployment was far higher than the recorded rate. In the North East, many women were in fact never formally in the workforce, so they weren’t captured in the statistics. As is usually the case, macro-level aggregate figures masked individuals’ daily realities at the micro level. The data concealed the impact of the economic changes on actual people.
The prospects for school leavers (high school graduates) like myself were especially grim. All the jobs had moved somewhere else in the country. There were few local opportunities for further education. In the mid-1980s, only 10 percent of people had something lined up when they left school. Youth unemployment was a full-blown national crisis.
Faced with the prospect that his daughter might end up even worse off than he was, my father told me to get out—to go to London, or Europe, or America. “There’s nothing for you here, pet,” he said.
Through hard work, luck, and government support, I managed to go farther than my dad could ever have imagined. I studied at St. Andrews University in Scotland, then in Moscow in the late 1980s. I made it across the Atlantic, to America’s northeast corridor and Harvard University, in 1989, just as the Cold War ended, and eventually became an American citizen. Education was my route out of poverty and the door to opportunity.
My personal story is a testament to the power of social, economic, and geographic mobility. My journey through different time periods and countries also helps to explain how we got to our current moment. When I began my career as a historian at St. Andrews, I realized that my family were active participants in British and European socioeconomic history. At Harvard, when I took additional courses in political economy and began to familiarize myself with America’s postindustrial plight, I discovered that I was a real-time study in mobility—both downward and upward. What was abstract in the lectures and textbooks was my family’s actual life. We were living data points.
In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up in Bishop Auckland, we faced the consequences of multigenerational poverty engendered by the rise and fall of the British coal industry and the fallout from the “modernization” of the British manufacturing sector. Over a thirty-year period, as the result of government fiat, industrial manufacturing in the United Kingdom shrank by more than two thirds. This amounted to the largest deindustrialization of any advanced Western country. The deliberate destruction of the UK’s heavy industry in the 1980s cast a shadow over British politics for the next four decades.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, I spent years traveling on extended research trips to Russia. I became a long-standing fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., in its foreign policy program. I served in the U.S. government as the top intelligence officer for Russia on the National Intelligence Council (NIC) under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Then I joined the National Security Council at the White House in the aftermath of Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs under Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019.
