In 1973, Semyonov's novel Seventeen Moments of Spring (1968) was adapted to television as a twelve-part mini-series about the Soviet spy Maksim Isaev operating in wartime Nazi Germany as Max Otto von Stierlitz, charged with preventing a separate peace between Nazi Germany and America which would exclude the USSR.
However, the circle closed in the late 1970s when The Sandbaggers (1978-80) presented the grit and bureaucracy of espionage.