Salman Rushdie

Name	Occupation	Possible influence	Speculation / circumstantial evidence
Salman Rushdie	Novelist	British intelligence	According to CelebrityNetWorth, Salman Rushdie is worth $15 million "through his many publications, his role in film, and his cameo appearances in television shows". So dull are Rushdie's novels that Ruhollah Khomeini (a CIA-backed operative and TIME magazine's Man of the Year 1979) took pity on the Briton and ordered a fatwa to kill Rushdie — thus catapulting his career to unimaginable success. In June 2007, Rushdie's achievement in helping to spread psychosis-inducing fear worldwide was rewarded by Queen Elizabeth II with a knighthood "for services to literature". At least Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appears to have recused himself from accepting a £930,000 book deal in 2011. Such courageous restraint from amassing fortunes off fame gained through intelligence tricks is indeed admirable. Left:  Night bachelor, the Knight Bachelor, suffers the seclusion of a free-speech hero persecuted by the former "Ayatollah" of Iran -- a man who was probably neither Persian nor Arabic, but of British-Indian heritage (like Rushdie), if he even existed.