If, as many expect, Secretary of State John Kerry comes up as empty as all of the U.S. leaders before him who have tried to broker Middle East peace, it will be due in no small part to the lingering influence of an extinct superpower.

Like his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was handpicked, trained and funded by the KGB to head the Palestinian Liberation Organization and help advance Soviet-style communism in the Middle East in the wake of the defeat of proxies Egypt and Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, says a top Soviet bloc intelligence officer at the time.

When Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev and his KGB director, Yuri Andropov, sought to build up Arafat’s international stature as a peacemaker, they called on America’s “favorite tyrant,” Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, to go to Washington and convince President Jimmy Carter that Arafat was a trustworthy negotiating partner.