Deputy Chief of Mission
Virginia Bennett, Deputy Chief of Mission (State Department Photo)
Virginia Bennett is a career Foreign Service Officer who has served in a wide variety of positions over her nearly twenty years in the Foreign Service. Most recently, she served as a Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department of State under Secretary Clinton. During that time, she managed the Secretary’s travel to the Middle East and Latin America, as well as substantive communication between the Secretary and those Department of State bureaus on issues of interest. Prior to serving Secretary Clinton, she spent two years as the Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff to Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.
From 2005 – 2007, Ms. Bennett managed the counternarcotics foreign assistance program to the Colombian National Police’s aviation program. Prior to that, she spent almost four years in New York at the U.S. Mission to the UN, covering Security Council developments on Afghanistan after 9/11 and then Iraq in the run-up to and after the Iraq War. She has also served in Tokyo and the Philippines, as well as in Washington, where she served in the State Department’s 24/7 Operations Center and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
Ms. Bennett speaks French, Spanish, and Japanese. She graduated from Wellesley College and has a Master’s in Business Administration from Cornell University. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, she is married to Scott Sekerke and has one daughter.