REPUBLICANS: Watergate, Contd.

The case had begun to resemble a dinner party at which the silverware starts disappearing. A certain taut silence has descended, but one cannot help noticing an embarrassing bulge in one of the guests' dinner jackets. No one was making any official accusations yet, but in the midst of a curious noncooperation from the White House and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, the suspicion grew that someone not far from the center of Republican power in Washington had engineered the Watergate Caper.

It began on the night of June 17 when police arrested five men as they tried to install or remove electronic bugging devices in the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex. One of the men, James W. McCord Jr., was the former security coordinator for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. Two of the intruders carried papers linking them to E. Howard Hunt Jr., a former White House consultant who worked closely with the C.R.P. security men. Since then, the case has been quietly burgeoning into the most intriguing and potentially volatile mystery of the election year. At least two former White House aides seem to be involved in the plot, and federal investigators have learned that a total of $114,000 in money from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President found its way into the Miami bank account of Bernard Barker, the leader of the Watergate Five and an ex-CIA agent.

Plumber. The Justice Department has discovered that $25,000 of the money was gathered by Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the Republican finance chairman in the Midwest, who told the FBI he had collected the cash from G.O.P. contributors early in April. He converted it into a $25,000 cashier's check on April 10, and the next day gave the check to Maurice Stans, the former Commerce Secretary who is now Nixon's national finance chairman. Stans, who is expected to be called soon to testify before the grand jury investigating the case, has reportedly explained that he dropped the $25,000 into the C.R.P.'s campaign chest and does not know what happened to it after that.