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USING his far-reaching powers, the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, has entered the growing controversy over why the White House asked for secret FBI background files on 339 Reagan and Bush administration officials.

The documents were highly sensitive. Some go back to the notorious information-collecting era of the FBI director J Edgar Hoover and contain tittle-tattle, unverified rumours, details of people suspected of crimes but never arrested, and accounts of people's lifestyles, including behaviour that might risk blackmail.

Republicans are likening the affair to President Nixon's use of FBI reports in an effort to control the Watergate scandal. John Dean, his White House counsel, wrote in his memoirs of sessions with L Patrick Gray, the FBI acting director, "during which he would hand me his personal attache case filled with FBI reports".

Robert Dole, the Republican presidential candidate, has talked of "dirt digging" that "smells to high heaven", casting doubt on President Clinton's explanation that the files request was a "completely honest bureaucratic snafu" in updating his security system. It is being pointed out that when Mr Clinton was running for president, he was the first to complain about efforts by some Bush administration officials to obtain records of his student passport application in the hope of finding damaging information. They were looking for anything embarrassing about his trip to Moscow during the Vietnam War while he was a student at Oxford.

After the election, in what was considered an act of retaliation, personal dossiers of about 160 Reagan and Bush officials, which were stored at the State Department, were searched by Clinton officials.

He admitted passing on derogatory information to Craig Livingstone, a supervisor and Clinton appointee who was involved in the 1992 campaign

Mr Livingstone's boss at the time was William Kennedy, a former law partner in Arkansas of Hillary Clinton. The FBI request was made at a bad time for President Clinton. The suspicion is that he may have wanted some ammunition to cope with his troubles, which included Whitewater and the so-called "travelgate" affair involving Mrs Clinton's role in the sacking of staff in the White House travel office in favour of friends and a relative.

Mr Starr is using the jurisdiction granted to him to investigate the travel situation. The files flap developed after it emerged last week that the background going back 32 years of Billy Ray Dale, the travel office director, was requested seven months after he was sacked.

The list so far released by the White House goes only from A to G. It included:

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