WASHINGTON — The State Department will forgo pushing for the release of the five Americans now held hostage in Iran’s Evin Prison at a meeting in Baghdad between America’s and Iran’s ambassadors today.

American diplomats said they expect their Iranian counterparts to repeat their demand for the release of dozens of Iranian nationals rounded up by the recent American mission to disrupt and destroy Iran’s terrorism networks in Iraq.

But prospects for a swap are dim. Yesterday, a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, did not take the bait when asked if it would be a missed opportunity if the fate of the jailed Americans, whom the Iranians have accused of espionage, were not brought up at the Baghdad parley.

“It is a missed opportunity not to allow these people to leave for the past two months,” he said.

The Americans being held include the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East program, Haleh Esfandiari. The Iranian-American wife of Shaul Bakhash, America’s most respected scholar of Shiite Islam, Ms. Esfandiari appeared on Iranian television last week in what Mr. Bakhash told the Washington Post was a deceptively edited, scripted “confession” that mirrored the talking points of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry.

Some within the national security bureaucracy believe that the abduction and jailing of the four Iranian-Americans and a former FBI official, Robert Levinson, are in response to America’s campaign against Iran’s network in Iraq, American intelligence sources said. When Iran’s Revolutionary Guard took British sailors hostage in March, the crew was released only after an Iranian second secretary from the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad was returned from his detention in an Iraqi-American detention facility, they noted.

Iran has already won the right to check in on five men rounded up by the Americans in January at an Iranian building in Irbil, Iraq.

The Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, has described the five men as diplomats working at one of Iran’s consulates. Coalition forces have said the men were senior Iranian operatives working with local terrorists.

Inside the administration, Secretary of State Rice has previously pressed the top American commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to agree to release the men in exchange for concessions, according to a Washington diplomat. The general, still pressing on with his rollback of the Iranian network, has declined her request.

Yesterday, Ms. Rice’s spokesman said there has been no progress in terms of Iranian behavior since the first meeting between Mr. Qomi and the American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, in Baghdad.

“Now, after the first meeting, we haven’t seen really any appreciable change in their behavior, certainly not for the positive,” Mr. McCormack said.

“We had gone into this with the thought in mind that perhaps more than one meeting would be required. So the secretary, in consultation with the White House, decided that there another one more meeting was merited, so that we could underscore for the Iranian government directly the importance of their changing behavior, if they truly do want to match their actions with their words.”

Mr. McCormack made reference yesterday to an Iranian network supplying sophisticated roadside explosives to militias and terrorists in Iraq.

On Sunday, coalition forces announced the arrest of a man they claimed was an Iraqi arms dealer connected to the Iranian Quds Force in eastern Iraq, near the border with Iran.