Born in
Baltimore, Maryland, Satterfield graduated from the
University of Maryland, College Park, with a
bachelor of arts in 1976. He entered the
Foreign Service in 1980, and has served overseas in
Jeddah,
Tunis,
Beirut, Algiers,
Damascus, and
Baghdad. Director of the Department of State executive secretariat staff from 1990 to 1993, Satterfield served on the
National Security Council staff from 1993 to 1996 as director for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. He held the position of director of the
Department of State’s Office of
Israel and
Arab-Israeli Affairs from 1996 to 1998, and was the
ambassador to
Lebanon from September 1998 to June 2001. The
United States Senate confirmed Satterfield to succeed
Edward William Gnehm Jr. as
ambassador to Jordan, but shortly thereafter (on June 1, 2004) the secretary of state designated him principal deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs (having served for the previous three years as NEA deputy assistant secretary), and in May 2005 he was sent to Iraq as deputy chief of mission with rank of ambassador. As a result, he never assumed his post in Jordan. On May 19, 2006, the
Department of State announced Satterfield’s appointment as coordinator for Iraq and senior adviser to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. as US ambassador to Turkey in August 2019 In May 2009, Satterfield retired with the rank of career minister from his nearly thirty-year career in the Foreign Service. Upon nomination by the U.S. government, he was then appointed director general of the
Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), an independent international organization, by the Arab Republic of Egypt and State of Israel, and assumed office on July 1, 2009. The MFO, whose mission is the implementation of the security provisions of the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace, is headquartered in Rome, with peacekeeping responsibilities in the Sinai. The director general is responsible for exercising his authority through his staff at the headquarters in Rome, the force commander and his staff in the Sinai, and the director general’s representatives and their staffs in
Cairo and
Tel Aviv. Satterfield returned to the Foreign Service and served as chief of mission in Cairo from August 2013 to January 2014 and was special advisor to the secretary of state for Libya from May to September 2014. On September 5, 2017, he returned to active duty as a senior foreign service officer and was appointed to serve as assistant secretary of state (acting) for Near Eastern Affairs. On 10 January 2022, Satterfield was appointed U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, replacing
Jeffrey Feltman. Satterfield was replaced by
Mike Hammer in June 2022; Satterfield left U.S. Government service on June 30, 2022. Since July 1, 2022 Satterfield has been Director of Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Affairs, located on the Rice University campus in
Houston. In the aftermath of the
October 7 attacks in Israel, Satterfield was appointed by President Biden on 15 October 2023 to the newly created position of Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On 25 April 2024, Satterfield was replaced by
Lise Grande. ==Personal life==