Portrait of a Family; Few firsthand accounts exist of the Saudi clan that produced the master terrorist Osama bin Laden. His forthright sister-in-law Carmen is set to change that.(Brief Article)

Byline: Christopher Dickey

Her Chanel sunglasses are pushed up in her dark hair. When she brushes back a loose strand, the emerald-cut diamond half as wide as her ring finger flashes in the crisp light of a Geneva afternoon. Her short tweed jacket with fur trim comes from Valentino, she says when asked, but she won't reveal how old she is. "You know, Oscar Wilde said you should never trust a woman who tells her age," she says, smiling. "A woman who would tell you that would tell you anything."

Her name? Carmen Bin Ladin (as she spells it), and yes, she's related to the infamous "billionaire terrorist" Osama bin Laden. For more than 15 years, she was comfortably married to his half brother Yeslam, reputedly the financial genius of the Saudi clan that includes 25 brothers and 29 sisters. But for most of the past decade, Carmen has been fighting a bitter divorce battle in Swiss courts. She's also been working on a book about her estranged relatives, their money and their country.

Publishers weren't interested--until September 11. Since then, "Inside the Kingdom," published as "Le Voile Dechire" (242 pages. Michel Lafon) , has been a best seller in France. It is being translated into at least 16 other languages (not including Arabic) and should be out in the United States later this year. It's just about the only inside glimpse we've had of the unhappy family that produced the master terrorist, but it is surprisingly honest and unsensational. You definitely get the feeling that Carmen wouldn't tell you just anything.

How well did she know Osama? "I didn't write much about him because I didn't see Osama," she says. She met him just once in the late 1970s, and then only for a few seconds. He and a nephew had come to visit Yeslam at their house in Jidda. They clearly hadn't expected Carmen, a young, voluptuous, half-Persian, half-Swiss beauty, to greet them in jeans and a T shirt. "It must have been a shock," she says. "Osama turned and started to walk away." She followed him. "Yeslam is here," she said. He kept walking. Mafouz, the nephew, explained that the devoutly religious Osama could not look at the face (much less the rest) of his sister-in-law.

Years later, when the world was clamoring for salacious gossip to discredit Osama's piety, Carmen says she was stunned to read that he'd been a skirt-chaser in Beirut. That was true of another sibling who later professed strict religious values, she said. But she never heard such a thing about Osama. "As for those celebrated pictures of the Bin Ladin brothers posing in Sweden, Osama's not in them," she writes. "The media confused him with his brother Salah."

It was through the women of the family--and through Yeslam, whom she met in Switzerland in 1973 and married in Jidda the following year--that Carmen got most of her education about the clan. The dynasty's founder was Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, from the Hadramawt region in what is now Yemen. He befriended King Abdel Aziz, who had conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula and founded the state named after his family, Al Saud, in the 1920s. As ...