Fiona Hill Gave a Master Class in Calling Out a False Narrative at Work

9 min readNov 17, 2020

Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for Europe and Russia, testifies before the House Intelligence Committee in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill November 21, 2019, in Washington, DC. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When I was a summer associate at a big, white-shoe Manhattan law firm in my mid-20s, every summer associate was assigned a partner advisor. Mine was a big dog in banking, a subject in which I had no knowledge or interest. He took me for an obligatory lunch where we made strained conversation, and that was that.

I forgot about it until a few weeks later, when I saw the partner in the lobby at lunchtime with two other big dog partners, both male, and three of my fellow summer associates — also all male. They were guffawing and schmoozing in that big dog way, and I remember thinking: Oh, of course — I was the lunch he had to take, this is the lunch he wants to take. It was my first encounter with the glass ceiling, a barrier that would keep me from otherwise advancing as the men around me did.

It was a good thing I wanted to be a writer, not a lawyer. But even so, I can think of more than a few instances when I saw senior men in media gravitating toward my male colleagues for mentorship, and sponsorship, and even just fellowship. The fellowship part is harder to quantify, especially when you don’t have it. It’s the ineffable sense of belonging, of camaraderie, of information flow, of a group that has your back. It’s not anything you can point to, exactly — you’re still at the same team meetings and doing the same (likely very good) work — but sometimes you miss a reference, or realize that there were drinks the other night, or a few people went to a game, or even it gets suddenly quiet when you walk into the break room. It’s like a Spidey sense; it tingles.

That’s what I thought of when former White House National Security official Fiona Hill testified about her friction with Gordon Sondland, the current U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and her professional colleague in the diplomatic corps. Hill testified about instigating some “testy exchanges” with Sondland over office communications protocols, and his seeming to be cutting her out of said communications:

In her private deposition, Hill detailed two meetings where she confronted Sondland about why he was trying to set up a Trump-Ukraine phone call and meeting. Sondland is the ambassador to the European Union, and yet here he was intricately involved in U.S.-Ukraine policy. She was the top Russia expert on the National Security Council, someone who would normally take the lead on setting up these meetings.
But from her perspective, Sondland hadn’t just overstepped the bounds of his portfolio, he had completely sidelined her and her national security team. They just weren’t in the loop.

In her public testimony, Hill recounted being “angry” at Sondland for going around her and seeming to cut her out of diplomatic activities regarding Ukraine. In fact, she said that it was not until she heard Sondland’s testimony on Wednesday of this week — the day before her own testimony — that she realized what had been going on. Sondland had been tasked with a totally different directive:

We have a robust interagency process that deals with Ukraine… It struck me yesterday when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right. Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security [and] foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.

This woman — this amazingly smart, expert, experienced, accomplished woman — only realized the day before she testified what was going on. Yes, by now she knew there was an irregular diplomatic channel, but sometimes the click moment of “how did this happen?” only comes when you find out about all the emails you weren’t cc’d on. She was the top Russia expert in the White House, an expert on Vladimir Putin with a 520-page book to show for it, a career national security expert, a PhD, and her Spidey sense had tingled. They’d tried to keep it from her, they’d laughed it off and papered over it, and all she’d been left with was a feeling that something was off. And guess what? She was right.

It’s time for a disclaimer. Not all women have had off-kilter workplace experiences, and not all women would feel a frisson of familiarity reminiscent of their own Spidey tingle. But many have, and many would, and many do.

Back to Fiona Hill, whose competence is near-universally acknowledged, even the stuff of myth (when she was 11, a classmate set her hair on fire while she was taking a test, and she extinguished the fire with her hand and continued to take the test. Could this president even?). Now let’s slide a day backward to the testimony of Sondland. Did you happen to catch that dude? He was like Spicoli from Fast Times At Ridgemont High if he’d grown up to own a few hotels, donate $1 million to the Trump inauguration committee, and buy himself a cool EU ambassadorship. You can almost picture him ordering pizza to the hearing room, as easy and unruffled as testifying that he made a casual phone call to the president on an unsecured cell phone line from a Ukranian cafe. (Have you ever seen a James Bond movie? Alias? Chuck? Right, then you, untrained civilian, know that’s just a dumbass move). It’s all good, bro when you’re telling the President of the United States that his Ukranian counterpart “loves your ass.” Sheesh Fiona, have a sense of humor. That’s just how bros talk to each other when they’re bro-ing out. By contrast, the first time Trump met Fiona Hill, his top Russia expert, he assumed she was a secretary.

Not everything is Hill being briskly efficient and Sondland being an affable bro and Trump being the boss from hell who says, no, don’t bother submitting that receipt for the night at the strip club, let’s just write “overtime dinner” and no one will notice. (Honestly, a strip club scandal would be so refreshingly mundane for this administration. Sigh.) Not every workplace is toxic and political and back-biting and opaque. When you’re on a team and you share a goal — and those goals are transparent and explicit, and roles are transparent and explicit — then this is not an issue. But when you’re on a team and there’s confusion about who’s responsible for what, and accountable to whom, that’s when things can break down. And it may not be explicit, as toxic and political and opaque behaviors often are. But odds are that if your Spidey sense is tingling, you’re probably on to something.

To be a woman in the workplace is to notice things, often small things, barely something to wonder about except you are. Sometimes you’ll say things like, “Am I crazy, or… ?” and then wonder if XYZ behavior seems odd. It is likely that you are not crazy. You, like Hill, may not know why, but if it seems like something is off then probably it is. It could be as small as your having missed that convo in the break room — hey, it happens! — or as big as a fully functioning diplomatic channel running parallel to foreign policy because it’s actually focused on a domestic political errand. Tomato, tomahto. The point is, when your gut tells you something, it’s okay to listen and to believe yourself. That thing that seems crazy is probably crazy, not you.

We learned a lot from Hill yesterday. But hopefully, we learned that too.

Fiona Hill Gave a Master Class in Calling Out a False Narrative at Work

Written by Gloria Hale

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