Thomas Victor Jansen

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.

While at CIA, Tom met Laura Ingersoll, a career federal prosecutor working on the kinds of CIA criminal misconduct cases that Tom was investigating. After ensuring that they would not run afoul of conflicts of interest issues, they married on a snowy February day in 1994. Armed with the Career Intelligence Medal, Tom retired from CIA at the end of 2007 and “trailed” Laura to her two-year post as Justice Attaché in Paris, where he roamed the country running background investigations for the State Department – bookending his early OSI assignments running personnel security investigations in California. After Laura first retired in 2011, they traveled the world and our own magnificent country, and Tom (a/k/a “Papa”) especially delighted in helping Adam and his wife Sharon raise their beautiful young twins.

Tom was a faithful worshipper and active volunteer at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, where he was an usher, served as Vestry secretary, sat on the grant-making board of Workers of St. Alban’s (WSA), and helped out at the WSA’s Opportunity Shop. For several years, he organized St. Alban’s volunteers providing classroom and food assistance for Harriet Tubman Elementary School in Columbia Heights, where the children hailed him loudly as “Mr. Tom.” With Laura, he marched against gun violence, for human rights, and in “No Kings” protest. He also volunteered for several years at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, supporting services to wounded warriors.

An unassuming man of exceptional integrity, kindness, loyalty, and decency, devoted to family and country, Tom was gracious to everyone who crossed his path. He is deeply mourned by his wife Laura Ingersoll, and by his son and daughter-in-law, Adam and Sharon Jansen, and their children Melissa and Ethan. He is also survived and missed by nieces Karen Stewart, Vickie (Matt) Rafter, and Robin (Vince) Obarski; nephew Mark Ogren; brother-in-law, John Ogren; myriad cousins; and many dear friends. Tom was predeceased by his older sisters, Virginia Ogren and Marlene Stewart and her husband Ken; and by his former wife, Rebecca Pohl Jansen.

A service of celebration and thanksgiving for Tom’s life will be held on Thursday, October 16, at 11:00 a.m., at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 3100 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W. In lieu of flowers, Tom would have liked you to use your time and treasure to support people or animals in need.