Rio de Janeiro, Nov 7 (IANS): Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said Wednesday that she had to cancel a planned state visit to the US after Washington refused to apologise for spying on her.

"I was going to travel. We said there was only one way to solve the problem, and it was an apology for what happened and a promise that it would not happen again," Xinhua quoted Rousseff as saying in a radio interview.

The absence of an apology from Washington created an impasse, she said, adding that she did not want to run the risk of having a new spying scandal during her visit, which would be an embarrassment for both sides.

She stressed, however, the incident had not affected relations between her country and the US.

In the interview, Rousseff also responded to a recent story in the Brazilian Folha de Sao Paulo daily, accusing Brazil's intelligence agency of spying on diplomats from Russia, Iran and Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

She said the agency's operations did not involve privacy violations as no phone calls or emails were tapped.