I also tried with the latest version of the game and it doesn't work.
In my case, I declined planting the bug in the embassy. I found the flag for it, but editing it didn't work. What I found strange was that there were also two other flags about the rescue mission appearing before the flag I mentioned. I also updated them and it didn't work. Since I was experimenting, I tried two other things, setting the flags to a different name (changing Abram to Bbram) and setting the flags to the same name as ones previously set. Neither of them worked and the save couldn't be loaded.
I also tried removing them and leaving only the flags relating to the first task, but it didn't work. I saw that after a flag's name & value, the 4th byte was holding some counter, with values like m, n, o, etc. (in my file). I guess that removing the lines should be done with updating the counter for the following values. Because the counter values were pretty small, I guess it starts from 0 based on some trigger.
A solution may be to check a save file for a character which accepted the task and compare the flag values. But I'm afraid there may be another field set beyond this named ones which holds the actual state if Abram should talk to you again.
