CAIRO, Egypt — Iran’s state-controlled television aired a short clip yesterday touting an upcoming news program apparently showing taped confessions by two Iranian-American scholars jailed this year on charges of espionage. One of them, Haleh Esfandiari, 67, looks pale but otherwise healthy and wears a black chador over all but her face and hands. She is shown in a residential setting, speaking to the camera.

She confesses to being part of “a velvet revolution in Georgia,” the former Soviet republic in the Caucasus region, and suggests that she had been trying to overthrow the Iranian government “in the name of dialogue, in the name of women’s rights, in the name of democracy.”

Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning expert who worked for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, is shown separately.

The role of “the Soros center after the collapse of communism was to target the Islamic world,” he said, appearing in khaki pants and reading from a sheet of paper. He purportedly confesses to wanting to create “a conflict between the government and the people.”

A friend of Mr. Tajbakhsh, speaking on condition of anonymity because she frequently travels to Iran, said she was shocked by his appearance.

“He looks 10 years older,” said the friend, who last saw him a year ago. “He didn’t used to have white hair. Now his head is full of white hair.”

The show, “In the Name of Democracy,” is to air tomorrow night in Tehran, the Iranian capital.

Ms. Esfandiari, Mr. Tajbakhsh, and a third Iranian-American, Orange County, Calif., peace activist Ali Shakeri, were swept up by Iran’s security forces in a crackdown targeting pillars of Iran’s civil society.

Iranian authorities allege that Ms. Esfandiari and Mr. Tajbakhsh are tied to an American-sponsored plot to overthrow Iran’s government.

In a statement released after the airing of the commercial, Ms. Esfandiari’s employer condemned any confession by Ms. Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, D.C. The center says Ms. Esfandiari has been held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison for 71 days.

“She has seen no one from outside the prison during this time — not her mother, not her family, not her lawyer, and not any independent international body,” said Lee Hamilton, president and director of the center. “Any statements she may make without having had access to her lawyer would be coerced and have no legitimacy or standing.”

The footage aired yesterday evoked chilling memories of the televised confessions of opponents to the Islamic regime during the first years of the revolution.

The confessions, which decreased during the late 1990s under the presidency of reformist Mohammad Khatami, rarely convinced viewers of their authenticity, although they intimidated many people inclined to oppose the government.

At least two other people with dual citizenship, Iranian-American journalist Parnaz Azima and French-Iranian Mehrnoush Solouki, are free on bail but barred from leaving Iran.