Topeka ? If Kansas law enforcement agencies receive warning of a terrorist threat, chances are it will come from a small team of military and police veterans here who spend hours sitting at computers poring over information from numerous sources across the country.

During the past few months, that team has quietly been working out of a restricted access, multipurpose operations room in conjunction with the Kansas National Guard called the Kansas Threat Integration Center. The team takes information it thinks is worthy of consideration by law enforcement agencies concerning possible terrorism or criminal activity and passes it on.

“They try to keep track of all the stuff that comes in, sift through it and take out what is pertinent to Kansas and its leadership to have in the way of data,” said Lt. Col. Craig Beardsley, director of military support for the Kansas National Guard.

Though the Threat Integration Center and its team were formed about seven months ago, its existence wasn’t publicized until recently.

“We wanted to make sure everything was up and running,” Beardsley said.

The three-person team consists of representatives from the National Guard, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the Kansas Highway Patrol. The team members’ identities weren’t released, but each person has well over 20 years of military or law enforcement experience, Beardsley said.

“It takes a special person to do this,” Beardsley said. “You have to be able to look at these things and see beyond the writing and see if it is something that could be important and why.”

The information the team looks at is both public and nonpublic material. The so-called open-source information includes incident reports from other law enforcement agencies nationwide and reports issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“There are simply hundreds of pieces of information they will go through,” said Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, Kansas adjutant general and director of Kansas Homeland Security. “We have diverse ways of getting that information.”

Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, Kansas adjutant general and director of Kansas Homeland Security, left, and Lt. Col. Craig Beardsley, director of military support for the Kansas National Guard, talk over some information received in the Threat Integration Assessment Center.

Reports from the security team are only issued when necessary. Over a six-month period there have been 42 of them, or about two per week, Beardsley said.

Though it didn’t trigger an alert in Kansas, an example of a piece of information that could have been sent out involved incidents in some states where bolts were removed from high-voltage power lines, allowing them to be more easily knocked down by high winds, Beardsley said.

“The big goal is to get information down to the street cop, stuff that can be read at roll call or the start of a shift,” he said.

Though team members say they are unaware of any terrorist incidents planned for Kansas that have been thwarted thus far, they don’t discount the possibility the state could be targeted. Kansas is known for its crop and food production, along with its military bases and aircraft industry.

“We don’t have Fallujah being fought in Kansas, but people do traverse back and forth through the state,” Bunting said.