CONTRETEMPS

It was four months ago that the President first tried to persuade Congress to grant $100 million in military and humanitarian aid to the contras, Nicaragua's rebel forces. Reagan went on an intense, high-profile campaign complete with apocalyptic speeches warning of a Communist takeover of the Americas and a televised appeal to the nation. In the end, the House voted against him. This time around, as Reagan takes another crack at winning approval for his package, he has adopted a more low-key approach, tending to rally support behind closed doors. Yet already the public charges, by both friends and foes of the anti-Sandinista rebels, are beginning to fly. Instead of speechmaking about Marxists marching across the Texas border, CIA Director William Casey told members of Congress last week of U.S. intelligence reports revealing that a Soviet An-30 reconnaissance plane had recently flown at least four missions over Nicaragua. The Administration speculated that the aircraft might have been used to help the Sandinistas gain information on contra operations. White House officials also said that a Soviet freighter had delivered a large shipment of arms to the Nicaraguan port of Corinto. That the Sandinistas were receiving weapons made in the U.S.S.R. or East bloc countries was nothing new. But for the past 18 months, such shipments had been sent to Cuba and subsequently picked up by Nicaraguan vessels. The resumption of direct deliveries may reflect a new and unsettling boldness on Moscow's part. In the midst of the Administration's warnings about the Nicaraguan threat, a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee released a report by the General Accounting Office, Congress's independent investigative unit, which presented dismaying evidence that much of the $27 million in nonlethal aid donated to the contras by the U.S. last year never got to them. Of $3.3 million given to one broker for the contras, only $150,000 was actually sent to Central America. Most of the money went to American companies and individuals, and $380,000 was funneled into offshore bank accounts on Grand Cayman Island or in the Bahamas. Alluding to President Reagan's controversial comparison of the contras to America's founders, Democratic Congressman Gerry Studds quipped, ''Our Founding Fathers did not maintain bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.'' The GAO investigation also found that some $743,000 in contra aid went to an unnamed Central American army and that the force's former commander in chief was paid $450,000 earlier this year. Democratic Congressman Michael Barnes identified the army as Honduras' and the commander in chief as General Walter Lopez Reyes. Secretary of State George Shultz attacked the GAO report as a politically motivated attempt to quash the contra assistance campaign, but Administration officials privately acknowledged that contra leaders had indeed skimmed aid money and that bribes to Honduran army officials were an accepted method of buying their support for the contras. They maintain, however, that most of the money was properly spent.