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News reports this week indicated that France may be preparing to swap a convicted Eastern-bloc spy for three prominent Soviet dissidents, including two physicists whose arrests spurred protests from Harvard faculty members.

The two physicists are Yuri F. Orlov, arrested in 1978, and Andrei D. Sakharov, banished to internal exile in January 1980. Shortly after Sakharov was exiled, the Physics Department invited the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and human rights activist, who is known as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, to spend a semester here as a Loeb lecturer.

But Karl Strauch, chairman of the Physics Department, said Sunday that no reply was ever received to that invitation or a follow-up mailed earlier this year, nor is it possible to determine if it ever reachec Gorky, the isolated city where Sakharov now lives.

Strauch was cautious yet hopeful about the report that a deal for the dissidents' freedom may be in the works. "If they get out. I would certainly think we would invite them here to lecture," he said.

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A senior State Department official cancelled an appearance at Harvard this week after news of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat's assassination.

Walter J. Stoessel. Undersecretary of Stae for Political Affairs, planned to speak at the Kennedy School but now probably won't be able to make it until at least next semester. John Mearsheimer, a research fellow at the Center for International Affairs and an organizer of the seminar, said yesterday.

Another Reagan administration official, Bobby Ray Inman, the deputy director for Central Intelligence, is still set to speak here on October 21 at another seminar jointly sponsored by the CFIA and the Center for Science and International Affairs.