Some of the writers, producers, and actors of OWI programs admired the Soviet Union and were either loosely affiliated with or were members of the Communist Party USA. The director of Pacific operations for the OWI, Owen Lattimore, who later accompanied U.S. Vice-President Henry Wallace on a mission to China and Mongolia in 1944, was later alleged to be a Soviet agent on the basis of testimony by a defector from the Soviet GRU, General Alexander Barmine. In his final report, Elmer Davis noted that he had fired 35 employees, because of past Communist associations, though the FBI files showed no formal allegiance to the CPUSA. After the war, as a broadcast journalist, Davis staunchly defended Owen Lattimore and others from what he considered outrageous and false accusations of disloyalty from Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Whittaker Chambers and others. Flora Wovschin, who worked for the OWI from September 1943 to February 1945, was later revealed in the Venona project intercepts to have been a Soviet spy.