Conspiracy theories have long been analyzed as fixtures of Middle Eastern political and cultural discourse, saturating news sources and Internet memes alike and problematizing the borders between truth and fiction, propaganda and popular critique. An overlooked aspect of this paranoid epistemic genre, however, is its connections to actual imperial conspiracies that have unfolded in the region. In this paper, I investigate one aspect of that connection as a step towards a genealogy of conspiratorial culture in the colonial (especially British and American) and Arab public sphere. This paper contends with allegations of conspiracy or treachery levied against minorities or hyphenated identities in Egypt and Israel during the first half of the twentieth century. In the wake of rising nationalist sentiments and the exposure of colonial and anti-colonial plots, minorities in Egypt and Israel began to be seen as always potentially conspiratorial, a perception that continues to shape conspiracy culture in the Middle East to this day. The paper takes Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed, The Pessoptimist (1974) and Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960) as its case-studies, drawing parallels to the clandestine operations that dominated the headlines of this period. In particular, I discuss the Lavon Affair of 1954 and postcolonial criticism of colonial Alexandria’s “cosmopolitanism” to highlight how imperial conspiracies by British agents, the Mossad, and underground Zionist groups contributed to a turn in popular Egyptian media rhetoric during the 50s and 60s against minority identities such as Coptic Christians, Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, and ethnic foreigners (“mutamassirun”). I also argue that secret plots of this kind often take advantage of ideals such as “cosmopolitanism” to further Zionist or imperial ends, strengthening an existing perception of minority identities as inherently suspect and foreclosing a legitimately cosmopolitan future. Further, I illustrate how nascent nationalist ideologies, such as the Free Officers in Egypt, were eager to use the exposure of these conspiracies to frame minority identities, such that inhabiting an identity that was not coterminous with strict nationalist religious and ethnic criteria became increasingly fraught, and ultimately resulted in the expulsion of most Jews and foreigners by the Gamal Abdel Nasser regime after the Suez Crisis (1956). The boundaries between legitimate fears of colonial interference and xenophobic, sectarian, or antisemitic sloganeering grow increasingly blurry in this period, as legitimate geopolitical and epistemic concerns become (through nefarious intention or historical accident) mixed with scapegoating and discriminatory political action.