>Not a single intelligence agency or diplomatic service will rely on ToR for security that’s madness... For the most part any country which can perform intelligence collection out of its embassy will have sufficient budget and and technical capacity to develop their own secure means of phoning home.
The CIA has it's own onion service:
ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion
Tor was developed by the US naval research lab, it was opened up because an anonymity network only spooks use isn't anonymous.
Smart intelligence agencies are not going to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, the onion router).
>A properly configured commercial or open source VPN is considerably more reliable and secure than ToR since you have no idea who is listening on the exit nodes
If traffic is encrypted this does not matter. (HTTPS also provides integrity checking to show messages were not modified in transit)
Also, traffic to onion services does not exit the Tor network - there is no "exit node"
>Also for highly sensitive material a diplomatic pouch is still the most secure means of transport as it never leaves your sight and is never inspected and if you do get intercepted then destroying physical media is much easier than securing network traffic to the same level of assurance.
They may use diplomatic pouches for especially sensitive information, but the need for low latency communication is strong. What's more likely is that one time pad codes for said communications are sent via pouch, and the communication itself then goes over Tor or some other channel.