ASHINGTON, May 15 — French officials today took the highly unusual step of complaining formally that their country was the victim of a campaign of "repeated disinformation" they say is being fed by Bush administration officials, accusing France of having provided military and diplomatic aid to Saddam Hussein's government.

	Advertisement

Though it has made no secret of its displeasure at the French for opposing the war against Iraq, the White House denied the assertion.

"There is, I don't think, any basis in fact to it." said Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman. "France is an ally; they're still friends."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose department and supporters are most often mentioned as a possible source of the news reports cited by the French, told reporters today that he knew of no such campaign.

"Certainly, there's no such campaign out of this building," he said.

Nonetheless, the forceful and public French complaint — in the form of a letter sent by Ambassador Jean-David Levitte to the White House, State Department and Congress — underlined the depth of ill feelings that still divide the longtime allies weeks after the end of the Iraq war.

In addition to the letter, which was first reported by The Washington Post today, the French Foreign Ministry said it was instructing its diplomats in the United States to monitor the American news media for signs of any orchestrated anti-French campaign. "We have decided to count the untrue accusations which have appeared in the U.S. press and which have deeply shocked the French," Marie Masdupuy, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told reporters in Paris.

Among other things, the challenged reports assert that France and Germany supplied Iraq with precision switches that could be used in nuclear weapons; that French companies sold Iraq spare parts for warplanes and military helicopters; that France possessed prohibited strains of human smallpox; and that France, most recently, helped Iraqi leaders escape to Europe by providing them with travel papers.

The charges have rankled French diplomats for months. They say such reports are hurtful to American-French relations, noting that several of them have been seized on by members of Congress to call for investigations or punishment of the French. The diplomats also say such accounts may spawn anti-French actions, some potentially violent. While suggesting no direct link, they said, for example, that a man was attacked and severely beaten in a Los Angeles restaurant because he was speaking French.

The disputed reports are "all untrue, and all serious," and "not acceptable," said Nathalie Loiseau, a spokeswoman at the French Embassy in Washington.

Ms. Loiseau did not specifically point to anyone within the administration as the source of the articles, but she said that France could only assume that journalists were being truthful when they cited unnamed officials in the administration.

"We don't know who talked to journalists," she said, "but we would like it to stop, because it's inaccurate and it discredits our country."

The administration, while denying the French allegation, has been frank in expressing its deep unhappiness with the French opposition during the Iraq debates at the United Nations, and later when it sought to block NATO assistance to Turkey during the Iraq war.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, asked on "The Charlie Rose Show" on PBS last month whether France would be punished, replied simply, "Yes." A midlevel meeting in the White House was called to discuss ways to do so.

Still, some experts have been surprised by the anti-French virulence that has come, if not directly from the administration, then from some of its supporters or sympathizers in the news media.

Jeremy Shapiro, associate director of the Center on the United States and France at the Brookings Institution, said the French sincerely believed that "there is a campaign, if not by the U.S. government, then at least within the U.S. government, to discredit them."

While "they don't believe this is actually presidential policy," he continued, "they do believe the president or the White House has not been active enough in counteracting it."

Mr. Shapiro said, however, that the French complaint might not serve Paris well. It might be seen, he said, as "a kind of petulance."

The following news reports are among those France has challenged:

¶In September The New York Times reported that Iraq in 1998 had ordered or purchased from France or Germany precision switches that could be used to detonate nuclear bombs. A French response noted that the switches had been presented as spare parts for medical equipment (as the Times noted), and that French authorities had immediately barred the sale.

¶A March report in The Washington Times reporting that during the previous several months two French companies had sold Iraq spare parts for fighter jets and Gazelle attack helicopters. The account cited American intelligence officials. The companies the French Foreign Ministry denied the charge.

¶A Washington Post article in November that said a Bush administration intelligence review had concluded that France was one of four countries, along with Iraq, North Korea and Russia, with covert stocks of the smallpox pathogen. The French government denied that it had human smallpox strains in any laboratories.