[elihu]

I expect that's how most industrial espionage happens; some company employs the services of some third party research firm to investigate a competitor's product and doesn't explicitly ask for anything illegal. Maybe that third party hires other contractors, and so on. The actionable information bubbles up through the chain, and the original company that funded the "research" has no idea where it came from. They might not even have had any intention of causing a crime to be committed, but ignorance is bliss.

It would be a lot harder to plausibly deny paying some third party for explicit sabotage; as far as I know, companies don't normally pay third parties to cause harm to a competitor for legitimate business reasons.