Mission Accomplice

The chiseled silhouette featured in the posters for Mission: Impossible will strike a chord with veterans, even if they're not Tom Cruise fans. The poster bears an uncanny resemblance to the logo used by the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. ''Maybe the producers were thinking of the difficulty of our mission,'' says the league's executive director, Ann Mills Griffiths, who says no legal action is planned because the design is in the public domain. But a spokesman at Paramount claims that the design has a longer history. ''There's nothing new here,'' he says. ''You need only look at a Roman coin to see that [using] silhouettes dates back to ancient Romans, if not earlier.''