After the conference, Rex ordered the 4,000 pages of medical records which had been releases from Debra Conway of Lancer. He read them all, scanned them, and created the JFK Medical Evidence CD-ROM, which Conway "helped me sell" in 1999. In the spring of 1999, Lenny and Rex met and talked about the idea of digitizing the AARC's records. Lenny then got some funding from Abby Rockefeller for a trip to Washington, D.C. Sometime in May, 1999, Lenny, Rex, Tony Marsh, Mark Allen (?), Dan Alcorn (?) and I met at the AARC's headquarters at 918 F Street, N.W., in Washington, D.C. to discuss the digitization of the AARC's files. Rex presented his "Digital AARC Proposal" dated May 5, 1999. It proposed a $600,000 project staffed by the group. This project was, of course, hopelessly unrealistic, as the AARC had virtually no funds at all, and there was no financial angel waiting in the wings. There were other problems,
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too. The AARC's files were enormous and comprised of all manner of records, many of them not easily scanned. Copyright and privacy issues
arose. And even if the documents were easily scanned, the process of unstapling, scanning, restapling, and filing the digitized version would be exceedingly time-consuming.
On a return trip, Rex presented a vastly reduced, no-budget version of his plan, the "Digital AARC Proposal, Plan B" dated May 17, 1999. This laid the basis for the CD ROM series which the AARC/MF/HM consortium created.
Sometime later that year, or perhaps in early 2000, Rex came to D.C. again. The first of the CD-ROM series, The Church Committee Reports came out in late spring or early summer of 2001. In 2002, the Russ Holmes Work File and Garrison Transcripts CD-ROMS came out. At some point after these CD-ROMs were issued, Rex and I discussed the fact that NARA's collection had thousands of pages of Church Committee transcripts which were highly relevant to the study of the JFK assassination but in effect inaccessible to almost all researchers due to the expense of obtaining them. As a result, on behalf of the AARC, I made a FOIA request for these records and sought a public interest fee waiver. NARA denied the request for a fee
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waiver. The AARC appealed. My recollection is that when I sought to learn the status of the appeal, I was telephonically advised that the appeal was being denied. In return, I informed NARA that I would immediately file a FOIA complaint in district court. NARA caved. As a result the AARC got approximately 12,000 pages of very valuable Church committee transcripts which comprised the 2004 CD-ROM.
Other things were also happening during this period. Rex says that in 2002, Debra Conway got him invited to a two-day private conference in Dallas hosted by Ollie Curma and Mary Ferrell. A number of Kennedy assassination researchers were invited to the meeting, including Gaeton Fonzi, Peter Dale Scott, Larry Hancock, David Lifton and several other researchers, maybe totaling 15-20 people. Those invited to the meeting were instructed to bring a proposal as to what could be done to further the case with an injection of money. According to Rex, everyone but him brought ideas for doing "investigative work, research, etc." Rex pointed out that "a great amount had already become public via the JFK Act. He proposed using the money "to disseminate what is already "out there' to a more public audience--building a website as the primary vehicle."
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Ollie Curma, the venture capitalist co-hosting this meeting, had previously purchased Mary Ferrell's extensive collection of records on the JFK assassination and established the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
Rex and Curma got better acquainted after the meeting when they flew back to Boston together.
But it wasn't until sometime in 2004 that Noah Simon, Curma's administrative assistant, contacted Rex about actually building the website. At the time, however, Rex was a computer programmer who earned his living designing video games. He was in the midst of a big game project and couldn't help them. He put them off for months. Finally, in January 2005, he left the game company and joined the MFF and with a small team began building the MFF website. The initial MFF website was launched in November 2005.
Sometime during this period I met with Rex and Ollie Curma at a hotel near the White House--I believe it was the Hay Adams. This was before Rex joined the MFF, as I remember discussing with Curma whether the AARC would allow the MFF to digitize its records. And I recommended that he hire Rex to carry out the project. In leading up to this discussion, Rex had identified the collection of about 700,000 pages of FBI and CIA
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