A high-profile woman of extremes

Mabel Wisse Smit (36), Princess Mabel since her marriage to Queen Beatrix's second son, is `extreme in everything', one of her best friends said a time ago in an interview with this newspaper. Mabel, she added, is extreme in her intelligence, her sense of adventure, her ambition and her charm. Not to forget her choice of partners.

It was said that at the end of the 1980s Mabel Wisse Smit, then in her early twenties, had had a relationship with drug dealer Klaas Bruinsma, who was liquidated in 1991 in Amsterdam. And it was said that Mabel Wisse Smit, when screened, as all future members of the Royal House must be, had lied to Prime Minister Balkenende. `There is no remedy for falsehood', he said on 12 December 2003, when the case came to a climax.

The Royal House, crime, a hint of sex, and all that in the Calvinist Netherlands, and then such a high-profile woman – an eruption of cynicism and malicious delight stirred the Netherlands. Mabel Wisse Smit was the `gangster girl' for weeks in the newspapers and on television. Nothing seemed as important as knowing whether she had stayed the night with Klaas Bruinsma on his yacht and whether they had had sex together. Paul Rosenmöller, former party leader of GroenLinks, asked her that directly in a television interview, after she married Prince Johan Friso. Her eyes widened as she said: `Except for Friso, you are the first person to ask me that point-blank. And the answer is brief: no.'

Paul Rosenmöller also asked her how she felt about her name so frequently being linked with men and power. Mabel Wisse Smit answered: `If women are successful when they are young, people often think it has to do with their relationships with men.' She thought that was `sexist'.

But when she said that on television, in November of 2004, she already had been rehabilitated for some time. Newspapers and weeklies wrote of her marriage, in April of that same year, of her work for the American billionaire and philanthropist, George Soros, of her talent for bringing people together to work cooperatively, a talent that had contributed to making possible the Rose Revolution in Georgia in December of 2003 and January of 2004. Mabel Wisse Smit was one of those who organised the use of Soros's money to send extra observers to Georgia when President Shevardnadze, favourably disposed to the Russians, held elections, to check whether these were being conducted honestly. When it was established that this was not the case, new elections were announced. Without a civil war, the democratic Michail Saakasjvili, with Western leanings, came to power.

The wedding day itself was also a rehabilitation. Prime Minister Balkenende was there, though in December of 2003 he had not wanted to request permission from Parliament for the marriage, through which Friso would relinquish his rights to the throne.

She was born in Pijnacker as Mabel Los on 11 August 1968. She lost her father when she was still very young. He went skating on the Loosdrechtse Plassen, where he fell through thin ice and drowned. She told Paul Rosenmöller her single-mindedness came from father. `I am going on with the life he didn't get the chance to lead.' And: `When he died, I resolved to become a missionary in Africa. Convert people to Christianity. Or go work in a school or hospital there.' Now she sees herself as `a modern missionary'.

When she was nine, her mother remarried. Peter Wisse Smit worked at the Rabobank. She and her sister, Nicoline, took his last name. A new sister was born. One of Mabel Wisse Smit's friends from college once said in this newspaper: `Along with her ambition, Mabel has something of the homebody about her. She loves the warmth and snugness of family life.' When Peter Wisse Smit died in 2000 of a gastric haemorrhage, Mabel Wisse Smit was very upset.

After she graduated from high school in Hilversum, she went on to study Economics and Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Under Professor Duco Hellema, known for his left-wing sympathies, she wrote her undergraduate thesis: The financing of peacekeeping operations under the auspices of the United Nations. She didn't take part in organised University life, didn't join a student organisation. Perhaps that is why, in the summer of 2003, even before her engagement to Prince Johan Friso was announced, two student-organisation members told the business monthly Quote that, in 1989, they had seen Mabel Wisse Smit with Klaas Bruinsma at a party in an anti-squat building in Vondelpark in Amsterdam. When the Telegraaf and the tabloid Weekend then telephoned Government Information Services, they were told more than they had counted on: Mabel Wisse Smit knew Bruinsma from sailing matches, but she was said to have stopped all contact with him when she became aware of Bruinsma's criminal background.

And then, at the end of August 2003, the Netherlands' most renowned crime journalist, Peter R. de Vries, decided to get to the bottom of the case. He tracked down one of Bruinsma's former bodyguards, the Chilean, Charlie da Silva. On television he said he was certain that Mabel Wisse Smit had been his boss's girlfriend. That was when the `yes she did - no she didn't' slanging match started that lasted until 12 December 2003, the day Prime Minister Balkenende said there was no remedy for falsehood. Prince Johan Friso and Mabel Wisse Smit were later to express their heartfelt indignation about this: they had told no lies; at the most they hadn't told the whole truth. Why should they?

When she had graduated with honours in both Economics and Political Science, Mabel Wisse Smit went on to gain practical experience by working for ABN AMRO in Barcelona, Foreign Affairs in The Hague, Shell in Malaysia and the United Nations in New York. She organised all these work experience placements herself.

At the United Nations in New York in 1993, she got to know Mohamed Sacirbey, ten years her senior and married. But that did not stop them from openly beginning a relationship with each other. In 1992, when the war in Bosnia had just broken out, he had been requested by President Alija Izetbegovic to internationally promote the Bosnian cause, as Foreign Minister.

Mabel Wisse Smit became one of Sacirbey's lobbyists. In the Netherlands she set up the European Council for Peace on the Balkans. She found people like Thatcher and Giscard d'Estaing willing to lend their names to the cause. Sacirbey represented Bosnia at the peace treaties concluded in Dayton, Ohio in 1995. Then he stepped down as Foreign Minister and once more became Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.

The Bosnian government was responsible for his arrest there in 2003. It was said that, under his responsibility, 2.5 million dollars went miss-ing from the UN mission during the war. In January of this year, it was made public that Sacirbey will be extradited to Bosnia by the United States.

Shortly after Dayton, Mabel Wisse Smit and Sacirbey ended their relationship. In 1998, she was approached by the Open Society Institute in New York to set up an office in Europe. The World Economic Forum in Geneva pointed her out as one of the future world leaders.

At the end of 2000, Mabel Wisse Smit was introduced by her friend Laurentien Brinkhorst to Prince Johan Friso. Laurentien Brinkhorst was then the fiancée of Friso's brother Constantijn. When her son announced his engagement in 2003, queen Beatrix said she was `especially pleased' with Mabel, `her very loving and talented, future daughter-in-law'.

Princess Mabel is still at work in Brussels, at the Open Society Institute of George Soros. When the screening by the Intelligence Services [AIVD] had not turned up any more damaging facts, she once again became the ambitious, brilliant networker she had been before the Klaas Bruinsma affair. Prince Friso has been Director of the Space Faculty of the INO [the Dutch Organisation for Applied Scientific Research] since March of 2004. The couple is no longer a subject for the serious press. The tabloids were concentrating on their first child until Emma Luana Ninette Sophie was born on 26 maart 2005.