You want moderators to setup the connections and not the user themselves? No, there's no functionality for that and no backend management of connections. I suppose you could put something together with a custom HTML form and CB Auto Actions though.

You'd create a auto action with Triggers set to None then set the Type to Connection. Next you'd substitute in the POST values of the users you want to connect. These should be user ids. Your HTML form would then just submit to the auto action URL listed in your auto action under the Global tab. Example of how this action could progress a form as follows.

Global
Triggers: None
Type: Connection
User: User
Access: All Moderators
Action
Users: [cb:parse function="clean" method="int"][post_to][/cb:parse]
User: [cb:parse function="clean" method="int"][post_from][/cb:parse]
Parameters
Format Functions: Enabled

With the above example your HTML form would submit to the actions URL with 2 inputs. 1 to supply the user id who is sending the connection request (input name should be "from") and 1 to supply the user id who is receiving the connection request (input name should be "to"). I guess you could always bypass this step and use something like RS Forms and directly insert the connection into _comprofiler_members database as well.

If you're familiar with the _comprofiler_members database structure then you can do that, but no triggers will be fired. CB Auto Actions would be establishing the connections using API so triggers will fire and you don't need to know the database structure. Do whichever you feel most comfortable with.