There was never any real likelihood of mercy for Pollard, the American-born spy, whose release has been vehemently opposed by the CIA and the Pentagon for many years. With his status as a departing lame-duck executive, in fact, Clinton had almost nothing to offer his friend Barak as an inducement to take politically dangerous risks for peace -- nothing, that is, except the pardon of Rich. Barak's pressure continued until Clinton's very last hours in the White House, when he made a last-minute call to the departing president on Jan. 19, hours before Clinton announced his pardon list.

Several clues about the diplomatic aspect of the Rich controversy were revealed last week by the House Government Operations Committee, although they were ignored by Dan Burton, the Clinton-hating Indiana Republican who chairs the committee. Former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, for example, mentioned that his reservations about a Rich pardon were mitigated by its potential "foreign policy benefits."

Moreover, the e-mails sent by Rich attorney Jack Quinn to the financier's associates in Israel showed that Quinn had even hoped to enlist Leah Rabin, widow of the late prime minister and close Clinton friend Yitzhak Rabin, in the pardon campaign. (Quinn was unaware that Mrs. Rabin, too, had passed away last year.)

The $1 million donated by Denise Rich to the Clintons and other Democrats during the past decade clearly weren't considered sufficient by her lawyers to ensure the results she and her ex-husband desired. Much has been made of the revelation that Denise Rich gave more than $400,000 toward the endowment of the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Ark. According to ABC News, however, she made the last of her three contributions to the library foundation in May 2000, long before discussions of a pardon began. At that point, Marc Rich's lawyers were still attempting to negotiate a plea deal with federal prosecutors in New York, where he was originally indicted in 1983.

Denise Rich excited still more suspicion last week when she declined to answer a long list of interrogatories from the Burton committee, citing her Fifth Amendment privilege. Among the questions she refused to answer was whether she had received money from her ex-husband, which she then may have passed along to the Clintons and other politicians. But even if she did -- which would be a good reason for her to refuse to incriminate herself -- there is so far no reason to believe that the former president knew about any illicit transfer of funds from Switzerland.

While Denise Rich obviously acted in cahoots with her ex-husband and his lawyers over the past few months, nobody who knows her thinks that she befriended the Clintons and other Democrats over the past decade or so in order to help Marc Rich. In New York and Los Angeles, the songwriter-heiress-divorcee is known as an energetic social climber, to whom charity and politics are simply elements of her search for publicity and personal fulfillment. The fanatical Burton, who is so unwilling to relinquish his role as the anti-Clinton Clouseau, may be severely disappointed if and when he does force her to testify.

Again, the Rich pardon will never reflect well on the former president. Exercising an extraordinary power that ought to be reserved for the repentant and rehabilitated, he rushed to a bad judgment that benefited a very bad man. Yet the true motives behind that decision may be far less damning than whatever Clinton's most demented detractors want us to believe.

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