Midcoast Forum on Foreign Relations

Amb. Vicki Huddleston

Monday, July 29, 2013

Topic: Africa: al Qaida, Mali, and Who Knows What Else?

Ambassador Huddleston is a retired career Senior Foreign Service Officer whose last assignment was the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from June 2009 through December 2011. Before that she was Chargé d’Affaires ad interim to Ethiopia, United States Ambassador to Mali, Principal Officer of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and U.S. Ambassador to Madagascar. She was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, and Director and Deputy Director of Cuban Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Prior to joining the U.S. Department of State, she was a Visiting Scholar at Brookings Institution.

Ambassador Huddleston was a Fellow at the Institute of Politics of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow on the staff of Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). She began her overseas career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru. She also worked for the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) in Peru and Brazil and lived in Sierra Leone as a Foreign Service spouse. Huddleston earned a Masters Degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a BA from theUniversity of Colorado. She has received U.S. Department of State awards, including a
Distinguished Honor Awardand a Presidential Meritorious Service Award. In 2008, she was a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Team for the U.S. Department of State. She is the co-author of “Learning to Salsa: New Steps in U.S.-Cuba Relations,” and opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, and The Washington Post. She is a former commentator for NBC-Universal.