By Laurie Kellman, .c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON, 3 (AP) - A former Cuban intelligence agent says one of the Puerto Rican nationalists granted clemency by the White House last summer helped pull off one of the nation's biggest robberies with funding from the Cuban government.
Jorge Masetti, who in the early 1990s defected to Europe, has been interviewed by aides to the House Government Reform Committee and was to testify today at a public hearing near Miami, committee chief counsel James Wilson said in an interview Sunday.
Wilson said Masetti will tell the story of how the Cuban government helped finance the 1983 robbery of a Wells Fargo armored truck in West Hartford, Conn., which netted $7.2 million.
One of those involved in the heist, Juan Segarra Palmer, was caught and sentenced to 55 years in prison. Palmer was one of 12 members of the FALN granted clemency by Clinton in August. Eleven of those were released, but Palmer struck a deal that will allow him to go free in five years.
Repeating a story published in his book, ``El Furor y El Delirio'' (``The Fury and the Delirium''), Masetti has told investigators that Palmer received $50,000 in ``seed money'' from the Cuban government to help carry out the Wells Fargo robbery, Wilson said.
After the robbery, the $7.2 million booty was smuggled to Mexico City in a recreational vehicle outfitted with special hidden compartments, Masetti has told investigators, according to Wilson. Masetti says he was involved in shipping $4 million of the Wells Fargo money from the Cuban Embassy in
Mexico City to Havana.
The Cuban Interests Section in Washington, which acts as Cuba's embassy, told the Hartford Courant earlier this year that the tale was ``more science fiction than anything else.''
In Puerto Rico, nationalists said their links to Cuba were confined to Cuban support for Puerto Rico's independence from the United States - support that predated Fidel Castro's 1959 communist revolution.
Masetti's testimony is part of the Government Reform Committee's latest effort to link Cuba to the FALN - the Spanish abbreviation for the Armed Forces for National Liberation - and its Puerto Rican arm, the Macheteros, or Cane Cutters.
Committee Chairman Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., earlier this month requested any records showing a link between the separatists and the Cuban government. He also issued subpoenas to the Justice Department and FBI.
Burton wrote to CIA Director George Tenet asking for surveillance intercepts and any other records on a Cuba-Puerto Rico connection. He also sought a briefing on the agency's knowledge of the pro-independence guerrilla groups the nationals belonged to.
The FALN carried out a wave of bombings in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s that left six dead and scores wounded. The Macheteros have been responsible mainly for attacks in Puerto Rico.
AP-NY-01-03-00 0947EST
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