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The idea was to vet the rebel groups and train fighters, who would be supplied with weapons. The plan had risks, but it also offered the potential reward of creating Syrian allies with whom the United States could work, both during the conflict and President Bashar al-Assad's eventual removal.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus presented the proposal to the White House, according to administration officials. But with President Obama in the midst of a re-election bid, they were rebuffed.

A year earlier, she had better luck with the White House. Overcoming the president's skeptical aides, she persuaded Mr. Obama to open relations with the military rulers in Myanmar, a reclusive dictatorship eager to emerge from decades of isolation.

As she leaves the State Department, the simplest yardstick for measuring Mrs. Clinton's legacy has been her tireless travels: 112 countries, nearly a million miles, 401 days on the road. Historians will point to how she expanded the State Department's agenda to embrace issues like gender violence and the use of social media in diplomacy.

"We do need a new architecture for this new world: more Frank Gehry than formal Greek," Mrs. Clinton said in a speech last week that served as both a valedictory and a reminder of why she remained the nation's most potent political figure aside from Mr. Obama.

And yet, interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials also paint a more complex picture: of a dogged diplomat and a sometimes frustrated figure who prized her role as team player, but whose instincts were often more activist than those of a White House that has kept a tight grip on foreign policy.

The disclosures about Mrs. Clinton's behind-the-scenes role in Syria and Myanmar — one a setback, the other a success — offer a window into her time as a member of Mr. Obama's cabinet. They may also be a guide to her thinking as she ponders a future run for the presidency with favorability ratings that are the highest of her career, even after her last months at the State Department were marred by the deadly attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya.

"Secretary Clinton has dramatically changed the face of U.S. foreign policy globally for the good," said Richard L. Armitage, deputy secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration. "But I wish she had been unleashed more by the White House."

In an administration often faulted for its timidity abroad, "Clinton wanted to lead from the front, not from behind," said Vali R. Nasr, a former State Department adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan who is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Mrs. Clinton made her first official trip to Asia, a choice that spoke to her diplomatic ambitions as well as her recognition from the start that many big-ticket foreign-policy issues in the Obama administration — Iraq, Iran, and peacemaking in the Middle East — would be controlled by the White House or the Pentagon.

In Afghanistan, several officials said, Mrs. Clinton hungered for a success on the order of the Dayton Accords, which ended the Bosnian War. But when her special representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, who had negotiated that agreement, fell out of favor with the White House and later died, those dreams died with him.

Then came the Arab awakening, a strategic surprise that eclipsed America's pivot to focusing on Asia and plunged Mrs. Clinton into a maelstrom. It tested her loyalty to longtime allies like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and reinforced her conviction that anger at decades of stagnation, fueled by social media, would sweep aside the old order in the Arab world.

After Britain and France argued for intervening to defend Libya's rebels against Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mrs. Clinton played an important role in mobilizing a broad international coalition and persuading the White House to join the NATO-led operation.

But it was Syria that proved to be the most difficult test. As that country descended into civil war, the administration provided humanitarian aid to the growing flood of refugees, pushed for sanctions, and sought to organize the political opposition. The United States lagged France, Britain and Persian Gulf states in recognizing that opposition as the legitimate representative of the Syria people, but by December, Mr. Obama had taken that step.

Still, rebel fighters were clamoring for weapons and training. The White House has been reluctant to arm them for fear that it would draw the United States into the conflict and raise the risk of the weapons falling into the wrong hands. Rebel extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda had faced no such constraints in securing weapons from their backers.

When Mr. Petraeus was the commander of forces in Iraq and then-Senator Clinton was serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee and preparing for her 2008 presidential bid, she had all but called him a liar for touting the military gains of the troop increase ordered by President Bush. But serving together in the Obama administration, they were allies when it came to Syria, as well as on the debate over how many troops to send to Afghanistan at the beginning of the administration.

Mr. Petraeus had a background in training foreign forces from his years in Iraq, and his C.I.A. job put him in charge of covert operations. The Americans already had experience in providing nonlethal assistance to some of the rebels. the plan that Mr. Petraeus developed and Mrs. Clinton supported called for vetting rebels and establishing and arming a group of fighters with the assistance of some neighboring states. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta was said by some officials to be sympathetic to the idea. Mr. Petraeus and a spokesman for Mr. Panetta declined to comment.

Wary of becoming entangled in the Syria crisis, the White House pushed back and Mrs. Clinton backed off. Some administration officials expected the issue to be joined again after the election. But when Mr. Petraeus resigned because of an extramarital affair and Mrs. Clinton suffered a concussion, missing weeks of work, the issue was shelved.

In an interview last week, Mrs. Clinton declined to comment on her role in the arms debate and stressed other steps the United States had taken. "We have worked assiduously, first to create some kind of legitimate opposition," she said. "We have been the architect and main mover of very tough sanctions against Assad."

"Having said all that, Assad is still killing. The opposition is increasingly being represented by Al Qaeda extremist elements," she said, adding that the opposition was getting messages from the ungoverned areas in Pakistan where some of the Qaeda leadership was believed to be hiding — a development she called "deeply distressing."

If Syria and Benghazi were low points for Mrs. Clinton, then the diplomatic opening to the military government in Myanmar, also known as Burma, was perhaps the biggest highlight. There, too, she initially met resistance from the White House and Pentagon as well as the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a stalwart supporter of Myanmar's prodemocracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Once she secured Senator McConnell's acquiescence, Mrs. Clinton sent her assistant secretary for East Asian affairs, Kurt M. Campbell, to meet the generals. When he returned, persuaded that Myanmar was poised for change, Mrs. Clinton convened a full review of whether to ease American sanctions and establish diplomatic ties.

White House aides remained wary about rewarding a repressive government. So Mrs. Clinton, in effect, made an end run, seeking out the president directly and persuading him to send her on a historic visit to the capital, Yangon, in December 2011.

"We didn't know what was going to happen," she said. "The president basically said, 'Look, I'm behind you on this.' "

While Myanmar's progress has not been without bumps, things have progressed enough that Mrs. Clinton accompanied Mr. Obama on his own visit last fall. And it was not the only bold move of Mrs. Clinton's focus on Asia. In July 2010, she provoked a sulfurous reaction from China when she announced that the United States had an interest in helping to resolve territorial disputes between China and its neighbors over the South China Sea. "There had been a lot of rhetoric about the pivot to Asia, but here was an issue where more U.S. engagement meant a lot to the region," said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.

And yet, Mrs. Clinton's involvement has done little to quell the tensions. China feuded recently with the Philippines over a rocky shoal claimed by both countries, and farther north in the East China Sea, is enmeshed in a dispute with Japan over islands.

Mrs. Clinton insisted that her involvement had put China on notice that it could not brush off international legal norms in pursuing its maritime claims. "There's still going to be belligerence, and there's going to be a lot of very hot rhetoric," she said. "But I think we've helped support a strong case for the kind of framework we believe in."

The fruits of Mrs. Clinton's work were evident last year in the fraught, but ultimately successful, negotiation over Chen Guangcheng, the dissident who sought refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing. When an initial deal fell apart, she said she passed a note to China's senior foreign-policy official, Dai Bingguo, which said, "You and I need to talk."

Huddling in a small room, she persuaded Mr. Dai to order his deputies to go back to the table with her team. "It was incredibly intense," she said, in an observation that could apply to so many of her days as secretary of state, "but I was always confident."

In a televised address, Mr. Rajoy said he regretted the damage that the corruption allegations had caused to his image — as well as to the image of his governing Popular Party and Spain as a whole — at a time of economic and social hardship. But he predicted that "this is as far as it will go," adding, "This party will defend itself."

Mr. Rajoy also insisted that his party had no connection to the $29 million amassed in Swiss bank accounts by a former party treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, who has been at the heart of the widening corruption scandal. His party, Mr. Rajoy said, "never gave orders to open accounts in a foreign country."

The prime minister said he would publish online his own tax returns this week. As to the financial rectitude of his colleagues, Mr. Rajoy said "all our tax contributions have been made within the strictest legality over all these years."

Analysts, however, said Mr. Rajoy's forceful defense on Saturday was to be expected and was unlikely to contain a spreading graft scandal on which the courts have yet to rule.

"The earthquake will continue because more damaging information is likely to come out, and the only way to put an end to such a scandal is to have a clear court ruling, which sadly in this country could take years," said Antonio Argandoña, a professor of economics and business ethics at the I.E.S.E. Business School in Barcelona.

Mr. Rajoy was speaking at an extraordinary meeting of his party's executive committee that he convened after El País, Spain's leading newspaper, on Thursday published what it said were excerpts from the party's parallel financial accounts, showing payments to leading party members above their official salaries.

According to the newspaper, the money came from corporate "donations," particularly from construction companies. Mr. Rajoy's name first appeared in the ledgers in 1997, shown as receiving sums averaging $34,000 a year through 2008, El País said.

After the newspaper report, Spain's attorney general, Eduardo Torres-Dulce, said the judiciary was considering incorporating the parallel bookkeeping evidence into an investigation into possible kickbacks received by conservative politicians.

While financial pressures have recently eased in Spain, the country remains stuck in a recession that has pushed the unemployment rate above 25 percent.

"Mr. Rajoy needs this scandal like he needs a hole in the head," said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy, a consultancy based in London that assesses sovereign debt risk.

"This comes at a critical time for the Rajoy government, just as market sentiment towards Spain is improving and foreign capital is trickling back," Mr. Spiro added. "If this scandal had broken last June, when Spain announced its request for banking aid, the fallout would already have been far more severe."

Still, the scandal has come as another blow to Spaniards who have had to tighten their household budgets under Mr. Rajoy's austerity program. Mr. Rajoy recognized this on Saturday. "We cannot give to Spaniards, of whom we are asking sacrifices, the impression that we are not at the highest level of ethical rigor and scrupulous integrity," he said.

Protesters gathered Friday night in front of the Popular Party's headquarters in Madrid, and garbage containers were set on fire. A petition started on the activist Web site Change.org, demanding Mr. Rajoy's resignation, had collected more than 600,000 signatures by Saturday morning — one of several such online initiatives pushing for a political overhaul.

Such public pressure could determine whether Spain finally makes much-needed changes to the financing of political parties and the administration of public affairs, said Mr. Argandoña, the business ethics professor. "You cannot really expect politicians to cut the branches of the tree on which they sit," he said.

Indeed, even as the finances of Mr. Rajoy and his governing party have come under scrutiny, Spain's other main parties are themselves mired in fraud scandals of their own, turning the political debate into a mudslinging competition between conservative and Socialist politicians.

About 300 Spanish politicians from across the political spectrum have been indicted or charged in corruption investigations since 2008 when Spain's property bubble burst. Few, however, have been sentenced so far.

But adding to the pressure on Mr. Rajoy's government, on Friday the Spanish police's financial crime unit released documents said to show that Ana Mato, the health minister, and her husband, Jesús Sepúlveda, a conservative town mayor, had a decade ago been given several airplane tickets, hotel rooms and other gifts by a company that has been at the heart of a lengthy kickback investigation. Ms. Mato, however, defended her "absolute innocence" at the party meeting on Saturday, adding that there was "nothing new" in a police report that related to facts that had already been reviewed by Spanish courts in 2009.

The statement, which also denounced American foreign policy, was reportedly released by the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party, and a translation was distributed by the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors the communications of extremist groups. The message, which was released on a Web site that has previously carried statements from the group, condemned Turkey's policy of supporting Syria's rebels against the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The statement included details that were similar to those released so far by the Turkish authorities, although the group's message had a different first name for the bomber than the one given by Turkish officials and reported in the local news media.

The Turkish authorities said Saturday that the man who detonated himself at the American Embassy in Ankara on Friday, killing himself and one other, was a convicted terrorist who had twice attacked government facilities in Istanbul but was released from prison in 2002 under an amnesty program.

Officials in Ankara said Saturday they were awaiting the results of a DNA test before releasing the bomber's name, but officials in the Black Sea coastal town of Ordu identified him as Ecevit Sanli, 40, and said he was a registered citizen of their town. Authorities in Ordu said the bomber was identified by relatives through photographs.

The statement by the militant group included two photographs of the bomber (in one, he is holding an assault rifle, and a banner bearing the hammer-and-sickle communist symbol is behind him) that appeared to be the same person seen in photographs published by the news media. The group identified the bomber with the first name "Alisan."

The attack, coming in the wake of the assault on an American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, by Islamic extremists, raised fears that it was the work of jihadists. That the bomber appears to have ties to a relatively minor Marxist group, which was responsible for political violence in the 1970s, is likely to challenge assumptions about the nature of international terrorism and the risks to American interests abroad. American officials, however, have not confirmed the identity of the attacker, nor a motive, and the United States plans to conduct an investigation.

The statement from officials in Ordu said on Saturday that Mr. Sanli spent five years in prison after being arrested in 1997 for attacking a military hostel and police station in Istanbul. He was then released in 2002 under an amnesty program for inmates with medical conditions, the statement said.

The authorities said Mr. Sanli lobbed a hand grenade during Friday's attack just before detonating himself, suggesting there were actually two explosions.

As the investigation continues, the authorities are trying to determine whether Mr. Sanli had any collaborators. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Mr. Sanli had fled to Germany after being released from prison, and had returned to Turkey only a few days before the attack.

The group has struck American and western targets in Turkey before, including during the gulf war in the early 1990s, and in its statement Saturday, the group condemned the recent deployment by NATO of Patriot missile batteries in southern Turkey.

In a report published several days before the bombing, Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned that Turkey's support of Syrian rebels in their fight against the government of Mr. al-Assad, as well as the deployment by NATO of Patriot missile batteries, was rallying Turkey's extreme left.

"The country's political landscape still bears vestiges of violent leftist movements from the 1970s, as well as deeply anti-American ultranationalism," he wrote. Mr. Cagaptay noted that some militant left-wing groups organized protests against the Patriot missile deployment in the southern port city of Iskenderun, where protesters have fired smoke grenades at NATO troops and burned American flags.