Don’t ask. Really, no, don’t ask. I know that it’s strange, but it was also a distraction.
Catspace
It takes a special kind of person to take a cat and toss it through a stable dimensional rift. Fortunately, most governments try to keep a few of such people around, mostly because the alternative is to not know where they are at all times; so the intelligence community lucked out when the first portals to Catspace opened. Whether the cats were equally unlucky is a matter of some discussion.
The basic rules to Catspace portals are this: when one opens up you have about five minutes or so to toss a cat through it. Once that happens, the cat will immediately appear, totally unharmed, at whatever location it most associates with gooshy food. More importantly: items go through with the cat, so you can attach a datastick to the cat’s collar and it will go along for the ride. Any one cat can go into and leave Catspace a total of eight times; the ninth time, well, the cat never returns.
As you might guess, this ability to transmit data securely and without interception has been adopted by spy agencies the world over, particularly when people learned how generate portals to Catspace almost reliably. The effective range seems to be limited to Earth’s surface – yes, there were secret plans to put a cat on Mars – and smuggling the cats into a particular country can be a pain, but the benefits are worth the inconvenience. As is putting handy supplies of allergy medicines in all the CIA’s break rooms…
What’s that? Yes, of course they put cameras on the cats. All but one of them failed to record. The one that didn’t reportedly showed that the cat was transported from Point A to Point B in Catspace on a silk pillow, while soothing music was played for it by vaguely anthropomorphic mice. The intelligence community took the hint and decided not to investigate further; believe it or not, some people actually still do read Aesop.