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Thomas Victor Jansen died peacefully at home in Washington, DC, on October 7, 2025, at the end of a long journey with Parkinsonism (multiple system atrophy, cerebellar type) that he traveled with his beloved wife Laura at his side.
Tom was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on September 23, 1944, to Herman Kern Jansen and Agnes Brady Jansen. After a classic middle-American boyhood and Roman Catholic education, he graduated in 1967 from the University of Omaha (now University of Nebraska at Omaha) with a B.S. in sociology and criminal justice. From Air Force ROTC, he was commissioned in 1967 and joined the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI), serving for 20 years as an OSI special agent handling criminal investigations and counterintelligence operations. Tom's first tours of duty were in California and Vietnam. While in California, he married Rebecca Pohl (a marriage that eventually ended in divorce) and their son Adam was born in 1974. Tom earned an M.S. in criminal justice from California State University in 1977. Moving to the DC area, Tom worked at OSI headquarters, served a tour in Honduras, trained scores of OSI and other military personnel, and ran dignitary protection assignments in the US and Europe. After retiring in 1987 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and a short stint in private industry, Tom joined the CIA for another two decades of public service, mainly in the Office of Inspector General's investigations division, where he was appointed to the Senior Intelligence Service. He returned to Omaha for a year as the Director of Central Intelligence's representative to the Strategic Command at Offutt AFB. In mid-2005, Tom became Assistant Inspector General for Investigations.