Chicago Tribune 31 Jan 1996, 5:7

'Nowhere Man' certainly gets the picture

By Scott Williams

Study the picture.

Titled "Hidden Agenda," it depicts an execution in a Third World country. It was taken by documentary photographer Thomas Veil, and suddenly one night its mere existence nearly canceled out his own. All record of his identity was erased. His wife and friends denied knowing him. Veil became the pawn of a conspiracy so vast, it's as if an occult hand had plucked him out of our reality and dropped him into a private nightmare. To save his life and quite possibly his sanity, he must discover the truth about the photo and himself.

Such is the tingly premise of Nowhere Man, which stars Bruce Greenwood as the beleaguered Veil. It airs at 8 p.m. Mondays (WPWR-Ch.50), right after UPN's flagship Star Trek: Voyager, and is retaining 60 percent of the Trek audience.

So, Mr. Veil, asks a reporter, thrusting a copy of "Hidden Agenda" before actor Greenwood--what do you see in this picture? "I see the end of my career, if I tell you exactly what's in it," he says, grinning hugely. "In this haze here, I see [executive producer] Larry Hertzog, pointing his finger at me, saying 'If you say what I think you're tempted to say . . . '" Greenwood lets the sentence dangle onimnously.

It's a compelling photograph. It shows four hooded bodies in ragged peasant clothes, hanged from a crude scaffold in a jungle clearing. At their feet two civilians kneel, in prayer or grief, and a little girl and a soldier look up at the dead. Behind them, in the left foreground, a burly, brush-cut man in camouflage fatigues, his back to the camera, stands in the door of a Humvee, smoking a cigar and looking at the hanged people. A soldier, helmeted, salutes the interior of the vehicle, while beyond it, another soldier is shoving along a couple of civilians. In the right foreground, a tattooed soldier draped with bandoleer ammo surveys the scene.

"It hasn't been made clear where this was taken," Greenwood said. "And you might cast your eye in here, if you cared to," he said, casually gesturing at the hazy region immediately around the cigar smoker. "It's not as hazy as you might think, but that's all I'm going to say about it," he said, gleefully savoring the moment. "It would be so easy to lead you astray and I'm so horribly tempted."

Hmmm. Detailed examination of the area with a magnifying glass reveals a corrugated metal roof, a clothesline, crates stacked behind an open truck, the hint of another, taller structure, but nothing definite. Aaargh!

Veil since has tracked down the tattooed soldier, Harry Corners, who went insane. "I think he was driven insane not by this event, but by events that followed it, when he was debriefed," Greenwood said. "Although he may have thought he knew what he was looking at when he saw it, even the people there may not have realized the import of the occasion," he said.
"More than that, though. I haven't asked myself, for example, how many letters are described in that scaffold," the actor said. "There's a lot of the alphabet hidden in that scaffold, if you care to look at it."

Good grief. A game of Hangman. There's a K, an A, or two, a Y or an I, an M, an N. KAYMAN? MANIAK? Arrrgh! What a puzzle!

The negative may reveal more than you see here," Greenwood said.

As for Thomas Veil's immediate future, Greenwood said, "I think there may be a corner up ahead. For some time now, Veil has been convinced that he's sane and he knows at some level, what's being done to him. "Suddenly I will find myself looking in the mirror and wondering if I am who I think I am. Or if what I think happened actually happened," Greenwood said.

"It's a nice place to be, in terms of the drama and of being an actor," Greenwood said contentedly. "It's just not very nice for the character."