Not much industrial espionage needed if you can just buy a Z80 CPU in any electronics shop in the West, then decap and put it under a microscope ;)
The bigger and more impressive challenge was "acquiring" the first batch of machinery required to build up the chip manufacturing industry despite the COCOM embargo, now this was apparently some James-Bond-like shit which involved 'proxy companies' in West Germany, which then conveniently went bancrupt to sell off their equipment, and 'somehow' this equipment ended up in East Germany a few months later.
The bigger and more impressive challenge was "acquiring" the first batch of machinery required to build up the chip manufacturing industry despite the COCOM embargo, now this was apparently some James-Bond-like shit which involved 'proxy companies' in West Germany, which then conveniently went bancrupt to sell off their equipment, and 'somehow' this equipment ended up in East Germany a few months later.