I'm not quite sure what you're insinuating about Tor. Tor is an opensource project govern by a non-profit. If you're worried about things like backdoors, that's why it was opensourced in the first place.

I'm not sure how you're connecting the CIA with Tor. I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA uses Tor. I know the State Department does.

Tor is open source but nobody knows who runs the nodes

It's a distributed anonymous network. It wouldn't be very useful if we knew who was running the nodes.

Of course. I am saying mentioning its open source says nothing about whether some of the nodes are CIA operated, etc

> Most free VPNs are run by state-owned actors

That's a dramatic statement however and you didn't support it at all with your links. Can you back up the claim that most free VPNs are state-owned? That is what the reply was likely asking for.