[2] Bodine previously directed the Scholars in the Nation's Service Initiative (SINSI) and lectured at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and serves on the board of directors of the UCSB Alumni Association and on the advisory council to the Program on Southwest Asian and Islamic Civilization Studies at the Fletcher School.

After initial tours in Hong Kong and Bangkok, Bodine spent her career working primarily on Southwest Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.

Bodine is also an Advisory Board Member of Spirit of America, a 501(c)(3) organization that supports the safety and success of Americans serving abroad and the local people and partners they seek to help.

In January 2001, en route to the Yemeni city of Taiz to meet with the country's president, a flight carrying Bodine and 90 other passengers from Yemen was hijacked by an Iraqi mid-flight.

While O'Neill viewed Yemen as a serious threat, unstable from the First Yemeni Civil War, with a large number of weapons, large cells of Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad, and many Mujahideen veterans from the war in Afghanistan, Bodine, in contrast, viewed Yemen as an infant democracy, a "promising American ally in an unsettled but strategically important part of the world."

Bodine was appointed coordinator for central Iraq in charge of Baghdad by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), which became the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) on April 21, 2003.

In an op-ed, Bodine wrote: "According to the mythmakers, a battle ensued between a cop obsessed with tracking down Osama bin Laden and a bureaucrat more concerned with the feelings of the host government than the fate of Americans and the realities of terrorism.

"[12][13] The ABC miniseries compressed Bodine's role to a single extended scene suggesting she was dismissive, hostile, and vulgar toward John P. O'Neill from the moment of his arrival in Yemen.

More than nine years after the USS Cole bombing and following the apprehension of Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, an alleged suicide bomber who is reported to have been trained and equipped in Yemen, Michelle Shephard, writing in the Toronto Star, published excerpts of an interview she conducted with Bodine.