It's a good concept for a novel, and I wish your friend well. I've done a fair bit of research & writing on secret agents & U-boats, too.
Regarding "the Welsh Connection" I found this tidbit via Google:
Quote:
As detailed later in the section "Terrorism in Wales - The Response", during WW2 the German Abwehr snapped up offers by renegade Welsh Nationalist Arthur OWENS to act for them. OWENS was of course turned and fed false intelligence to his Abwehr controllers, although a website consulted in preparing this article paints Mr OWENS more as a patriot acting alone than a little man scared for his life. One cannot beat good old fashioned revisionist history!
One very interesting find during WW2 is alleged to have been made in the Swansea area of South Wales. The article concerned is a S90/40 CW transmitter, which bears a date stamp of March 1941. The controls bear English lettering but the components are clearly German. It is said to have been seized from an agent/agents landed from a U-Boat on the South Wales coast.
Further the "Abwehr Diaries" record an attempt to land an agent, code named LEHRER [Teacher] on the coast of South Wales together with a wireless operator, the intention being to forge a communications link with Welsh nationalists. An agent of this name was dropped by parachute in the Salisbury area, and having been captured, not turned and found to be of no further use, was subsequently executed.
The set came to light after the war when it was found in the basement of 'Telephone House' in Swansea. It was amongst the amateur radio equipment impounded in 1939 by the GPO. Of the associated receiver there is no trace.
However on the roof of 'Telephone House' during WW2 there was based a radio monitoring centre. A story related by a former GPO employees tells of the Army arresting the operators of a covert transmitter in REYNOLDSTOW, a village near Swansea. Also Swansea is a busy sea port and during WW2 would have been very busy. All shipping to and from the equally busy ports of Cardiff and Newport, and Bristol itself, would have easily been monitored and the times of departure noted and reported from that location, by a person so minded. [Based on an article in 'Radio Bygones' written by Alan Davies, GW3INW].
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Among the details to note re German Intelligence: agents planted in foreign countries had their own chain of command through the Abwehr, separate from the Kriegsmarine. It was a source of inter-service tension, which might have been mitigated to some degree by the fact that Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, had been a U-boat commander in WWI.
Without having all the details at hand, a reasonable assumption would be that agents delivered via U-Boat would share nothing about their mission with the boat's crew, and that would include its skipper & radio operator. If one wanted to underscore the gulf between these people, one could have the agent commandeer the U-boat's radio & Enigma machine to transmit his messages by himself, using his own machine settings.
In such an instance, even if all regular U-boat radio traffic was received & decrypted by Ubootwaffe HQ, the Abwehr traffic would be understood only by Abwehr HQ. Every branch of the military that used Enigmas had their own machine settings & schedules for changing them. However I think it's also self-evident that agents would not risk bringing Enigma machines deep into enemy territory; they would have alternate methods of communication once ashore.
I hope this is of some help.
Mach's gut!
Wayne