WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Monday that newspaper reports that Iran and the United States had agreed to hold one-on-one talks on Tehran's nuclear program were "not true."

Obama made the comment at a debate on foreign policy. The New York Times quoted unnamed U.S. administration officials on Saturday as saying that secret exchanges between U.S. and Iranian officials had resulted in an agreement "in principle" to hold direct talks.

"Those are reports in the newspaper, they are not true," Obama said.

(Reporting By Tabassum Zakaria; Editing by Peter Cooney)