Power relations inherent in the encounter between anthropologist and informant preoccupied advocates of reflexive anthropology and their analysis has refigured the practice and writing of ethnography over the last three decades. Questions of truth, disclosure, and suspicion shape not only anthropologists’ relationships in the field, but also the data that can be collected and the cooperation that can be expected. For American anthropologists of the Muslim world, relations with informants are already charged with American foreign policy and military preoccupations. In Morocco, French colonialism, contemporary tourism, and Peace Corps activities have shaped Moroccans’ perceptions of foreign interests in their lives. Yet as this paper argues, political and historical factors internal to communities also shape the ways that informants accommodate or reject particular researchers and their projects. This paper explores research on Berbers in the charged 1990s, prior to the Gulf wars, given Moroccan governmental hostility towards an interest in Berber speakers and their grievances. Equally important were the community-internal and deeply-entrenched practices of secrecy and evasion that Anti-Atlas mountain Berbers deployed as strategies for controlling the circulation of information to fellow villagers as well as outsiders. I argue that the practices of revelation and secrecy I encountered were patterned after local understandings of the production, dissemination, and circulation of valued knowledge within these primarily oral societies. This complex ethical terrain required constant negotiation over not only the collection of knowledge but also its textual and acoustic documentation through ethnographic fieldnotes, interviewing, and audio recordings.