freckledmccree:

It was Italian. Personally, I do think his Italian accent was truly unconvincing to begin with, which caused Moira to bring it up, but in that moment McCree very much leaned into the awful and butchered it worse than usual just to irritate her.

Besides the botched waiter cover, we don’t have any other indication of him doing undercover work, so it’s difficult to assess what his track record is. I have my own thoughts, but they’re not rooted in anything solid. May I add, he got fired from the cover job not for blowing his cover but because he lashed out at a rude patron who, apparently, stoked his temper and self-righteousness.

One can probably draw something about his skill with undercover work in the Morricone Theory, which if true necessitates that he pulled off a cover identity for years. But your mileage may vary.

I tend to think McCree worked reconnaissance, based on his work in “Uprising” and on how especially put out he seemed Blackwatch intel was “spotty” regarding the amount and type of resistance they would run into at Rialto. I think he was sent ahead of operations to set up surveillance systems, collect intelligence and other useful information, scout enemy defenses and forces, and get a lay of the situation, then report back with his findings and with that give his opinion on possible plans of action based on what he’s seen in the field.

How much this function required undercover work, I can’t say, though I imagine this at times involved light and brief work just to sneak through, set things up, do some observation to be successful. Again, your mileage may vary.

This makes a lot of sense – it’s the kind of work that neccesitates short-lived cover stuff to the tune of ‘yeah I’m supposed to be here’ but he only needs to do it briefly most of the time – and only really at times when he can’t do the recon work unseen (or as in uprising: just in uniform cause of the situation). Waitstaff and similar is a good way to a) get into back of house stuff for recon and b) transport stuff around a room/get near someone specific with plausible deniability. Jesse needs an excuse to get in a door occassionally he’s not running a long confidence game on someone to convince them he’s someone else I guess.

There’s a few ‘damn our intel was incomplete for this one’ lines from various people. But it’s Moira who makes a pointed comment about it and McCree responds a little defensively which fits with the rest of her constantly having a go at him/talking him down lines (and also falls into the blatently suspicious portion of her dialogue tbh).

Also: accent(/level of Italian) unconvincing if he was pretending to be Italian? Sure. Unconvincing as an American speaking Italian? Probably not – and theres no reason for him to pretend not to be that (he’s pretending not to be an undercover operative). And like speaking with an accent is actually fine! (Jesse probably gets enough stick for his accent is what’s presumably his first language – so him having a kind of stock answer to lean into what people don’t like about how he talks makes a whole lot of sense) plenty of people speak with an accent be that regional or because it’s their second language or whatever, this isn’t a problem. (I would assume ‘I learnt it from films’ is either kidding or Jesse is good enough at this stuff to pick up a passable level of a language from films – either is believable)