Ambassador to Cambodia: Who is Carol Rodley?

July 24, 2010

By Noel Brinkerhoff

Source: AllGov

A career officer in the Senior Foreign Service, Carol A. Rodley is serving her second tour in Cambodia, having worked in the Southeast Asian country in the late 1990s. Although she has served in many capacities in the State Department, Rodley is well-versed in issues of intelligence and counter-terrorism.

A native of Massachusetts, Rodley graduated from Smith College in 1976.

Her Washington assignments have included executive assistant to the Bosnia coordinator for the Dayton peace accord negotiations; deputy director of the secretariat staff; Cyprus desk officer in the Office of Southern European Affairs; senior watch officer in the Operations Center; and intelligence analyst in the Russia Division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Rodley’s overseas assignments have included postings in Germany, South Africa, the Dominican Republic and Pakistan.

From 1997-2000 she worked her first tour in Cambodia, as deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Phnom Penh. During this time, she supported bringing former Khner Rouge officials to trial for crimes against humanity before an “international court.”

Rodley then attended the State Department’s senior leadership training course, the 43rd Senior Seminar, at the Foreign Service Institute from 2000-2001.

For the next two years she served as deputy executive secretary in the Executive Secretariat, until July 2003.

From 2003-2006 Rodley served as acting assistant secretary and principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. While in this position, she put together “Team Al-Qaida,” a group of State Department analysts whose goal, in Rodley’s words, was to “deepen our understanding of both specific terrorist networks and the broader international jihadist movement” using “computer-aided methods to mine the volumes of data and have developed particular expertise on terrorist support networks and terrorist facilitators.”

She relocated to Afghanistan to work as counselor for political and military affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, before returning to the states to serve as a faculty advisor at the Foreign Service Institute for Afghanistan and Iraq training.

President George W. Bush nominated Rodley to be ambassador to Cambodia in May 2008, a post she finally took over on October 24.

In May 2009, Rodley ruffled the feathers of the Cambodian government when, while delivering the opening speech at an anti-corruption concert in Phnom Penh, she claimed that Cambodia loses $500 million a year to corruption.

Rodley is married to David Newhall, and the couple has three children. Rodley speaks Khmer, German, Spanish, Urdu, and Hindi.