Carolee Belkin Walker is the Chief of Staff to the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA) Ambassador, Roger D. Carstens, a role which she has served in since January 2020. Walker previously served in leadership positions throughout the U.S. Department of State including the Bureau of Consular Affairs, the Bureau of Public Affairs, the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, and as a brief stint as a Senior Watch Officer in the State Department’s Operations Center.
As Chief of Staff, Walker collaborates with departments across the government – from the Department of State to the Oval Office – to secure the freedom of U.S. nationals held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad, support their families, and end the practice of hostage diplomacy. In her SPEHA role, Walker is the senior policy planner leading her team on policy implementation and she is the U.S. government’s primary point of contact for the families of Americans held captive abroad. Walker works closely with those families and returnees to help them receive critical support and resources.
Walker’s trajectory to arriving at her current position in her early 60s was “loop-de-loop,” as she often says. She majored in economics at Vassar – where her roommate was the late, great feminist activist Urvashi Vaid, and where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the famed Miscellany News.
She joined the Civil Service in the 1990s working at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson Center Press as the Managing Editor. In 2005, Walker joined the State Department as a public diplomacy writer and editor communicating America's story to foreign audiences. Her articles on U.S. life and culture were translated into multiple languages and published around the world. Walker joined the Bureau of Consular Affairs as a deputy director in the Office of Overseas Citizens Services, American Citizens Services and Crisis Management. Walker worked closely on the cases of the American hikers detained in Iran from 2009 - 2011 and served as a coordinator on multiple crisis task forces, including the Haiti and Japan earthquakes. While in Consular Affairs, she served as a Branch Chief in the Office of Children’s Issues leading a team of officers supporting victims of international parental child abduction and implementing the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. When she joined SPEHA, Walker became committed to building out the office as a crucial nexus point for diplomatic strategies and relations, drawing on her decades of experience in public service.
Walker lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with her husband. In her free time (not much since 2020), Walker loves to write and train for races. She has been a featured contributor for GovLoop – the government’s internal blog for civil service employees – where she wrote about leadership, mentoring, and career development. She began training for races in her 50s, becoming a marathon finisher at the Reggae Marathon in Negril, Jamaica, in 2015 and the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in 2017 and became a frequent contributor to The Washington Post, interviewing scientists, sports medicine specialists, and athletes on subjects pertaining to training and aging. Her writing on these areas has also appeared in Women’s Running, Prevention Magazine, ThriveGlobal, and Huffington Post and led ultimately to the publication of her book Getting My Bounce Back in 2018.
The views expressed here are her own and do not represent the views of the U.S Department of State or the U.S. government.