Angry President Denies Hostage Delay Rumors : Diplomacy: He says claims that he met with Iranians in Paris in 1980 are wrong. It is his first public statement on issue.

ST. LOUIS — An angry President Bush moved Friday for the first time to put to rest speculation that he and other members of the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign team had agreed secretly with Iranian officials to delay the release of 52 American hostages being held in Tehran until after that year’s election.

At the heart of a series of unconfirmed allegations is the assertion that Bush met secretly in Paris in October, 1980, with Iranian representatives. The plight of the hostages had become a severe embarrassment for then-President Jimmy Carter as he fought unsuccessfully for political survival.

Asked Friday whether he was “ever in Paris in 1980,” a clearly agitated Bush replied: “Was I ever in Paris in 1980? Definitively, definitely no.”

Bush had not previously responded in public to the allegations. His aides have denied in the past that he was in Paris at that time but they have refused to say where Bush--then the Republican vice presidential candidate--was at all times during that month.

Asked specifically whether he met with any Iranians, Bush replied: “That’s all I’m going to tell you.”

He fended off questions about whether others in the 1980 campaign met with Iranians.

After months of intense negotiations between Carter Administration officials led by Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Iranian representatives, the hostages were released in Tehran moments after Reagan was sworn in as President on Jan. 20, 1981.

Bush spoke out about the matter during a picture-taking session in the White House with Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez before flying to St. Louis to visit a housing project and push his plan for tenant ownership of public housing apartments.

The President has become increasingly annoyed by the persistence of the allegations. “He’s not happy,” spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said here.

Bush, Fitzwater said, “was in the middle of the campaign” during the period in which the reports suggest he was in Paris. “You give me a date when he was in Paris and I’ll tell you where he really was,” the White House press secretary said.

The allegations have been revived by Gary Sick, Carter’s chief Middle East policy expert at the National Security Council and now a professor of Middle East politics at Columbia University.

Sick, Fitzwater declared, is the “Kitty Kelley of foreign policy.” Kelley is the author of the recently released, controversial biography of Nancy Reagan.

For his part, Bush indicated his irritation when he cut off the questioning in the Oval Office by saying: “That’s all, but please print it. And let’s try to stop this rumormongering that’s going on, stop repeating rumors over and over again.”

In a recent New York Times article and a PBS appearance, Sick maintained that William J. Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager and eventual director of the CIA, met secretly in 1980 with the Iranians and with Israelis. Sick also has said that, according to some of his sources, Bush attended one meeting. Casey died in May, 1987.

Delving into another area of controversy, Bush told reporters aboard Air Force One on the flight here that White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu “has my full support.”

Sununu has acknowledged using Air Force jets for more than 70 flights since Bush took office in 1989, listing only four of the trips as personal for which he reimbursed the government.

Bush has been given a report by White House counsel C. Boyden Gray on a study he completed of the four-year-old policy under which the chief of staff and the White House national security adviser are authorized to fly aboard Air Force jets. Fitzwater said that as a result of Gray’s study, which was ordered by Bush, “there’ll be changes. There’ll be lots of changes.”

Asked whether Sununu would remain on the job for the next two years--Bush’s current term ends in January, 1993--the President declared: “I hope so, hope he will.”

Fitzwater said Thursday that the White House review had been expanded beyond the propriety of the flight policy to an examination of each of Sununu’s trips to determine if they were proper. The travel has cost the federal Treasury more than $600,000.

In St. Louis, Bush visited the Cochran Gardens public housing project, turning the spotlight of presidential attention to the role of low-income tenants in managing their apartment complexes and, eventually, taking over ownership--a centerpiece in his housing program.

Bush said that of the 3 million people living in public housing in the United States, 9,000 units are managed by residents. He asked Congress to provide the full $855 million he has requested for the coming fiscal year to provide “1 million new low- and moderate-income homeowners by the end of 1992.”