Carol J. Williams is a retired foreign correspondent who covered the historic upheaval that ended the Cold War in an award-winning 35-year career with Associated Press and Los Angeles Times. 

She lived through the USSR's brief era of hope for reform and the tragic consequences of its failure. She followed Eastern Europe's euphoric rebellions that toppled Communist tyrants from Berlin to Bucharest. In Yugoslavia, she documented the rise of ethnic and religious nationalism fanned by corrupt leaders who pushed their peoples into devastating wars. Her dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine traced those conflicts to unresolved ideological disputes from their days of imperial oppression.

Williams is a graduate of the University of Washington and holds a journalist law certificate from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She lives with her husband Ken Olsen, a retired editor, in Silverdale, WA.