In the wake of the First World War, Arabs embarked on a critical reexamination of the final decades of Ottoman rule in the Middle East. Their efforts, which would shape the collective memory of the region for the next century, took two forms: the publication of Arab memoirs and the “translation” of Turco-Ottoman memoirs into Arabic. This paper highlights a corpus of memoirs (mudhakkir?t) released by the Beirut newspaper Al-Ahrar and publishing house Dar Sadir in the 1930s, works the editors claimed revealed the secrets of Turkish Ottoman intelligence officials stationed in the Arab provinces during a painful final chapter of shared history. The proliferation of memoir as a legible Arabic genre in the interwar period carried with it certain expectations of authenticity. But “placing social value on…authenticity,” in the words of critic Louis Menand, “is an invitation to manufacture [it].” Indeed, the memoirs here considered were fabricated--in full or in part. The memoirs elicited a strong response from Arab readers, thanks to both their inflammatory content and the authoritative enemy sources from which they supposedly derived. Real or not, they brought to light old schisms festering beneath the surface of societies preoccupied with a new struggle against European colonial rule. The changing political landscape had recast the ethical bounds of collaboration. Arab readers and writers reflecting on the recent past thus found themselves navigating profound moral ambiguities: Who was a patriot and who a traitor? Through Al-Ahrar’s publications, curated by Lebanese editor Fuad Maydani, this paper interrogates the role Ottoman memoirs played in constructing alternative Arab histories of World War I. How, it then asks, was this process complicated by the problem of (in)authenticity? What were the stakes of fakes? The answer rests on an inquiry into not only the production of the texts in question, but also on readers’ nuanced engagement with them. Though quick to cast doubt on the provenance of certain memoirs, Arab readers in the 1930s remained hungry for new voices. In laying claim to memoir as a valid, if contestable form of truth-telling, they thus set the stage to circumvent official monopolies on history. This paper argues for us, in turn, to recalibrate our horizons of expectation as readers, and to recognize not only the perils of fakes but also their possibilities.