WASHINGTON // The acting CIA director says Zero Dark Thirty, the Hollywood take on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, exaggerates the importance of information obtained by harsh interrogations.
The film tells the story of the decade-long search after September 11, 2001, that climaxed in the raid on the Al Qaeda leader's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May last year.
The film shows US personnel using harsh interrogation techniques such as water-boarding, a method widely seen as torture, to force captives to speak. The information obtained was crucial, according to the movie, in piecing together the trail that eventually led to bin Laden.
Not so, said Michael Morell, the US spy chief, in a message to Central Intelligence Agency employees released on Saturday.
The movie "creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation programme were the key to finding bin Laden. That impression is false."
Mr Morell's message, sent to employees on Friday, says that "multiple streams of intelligence" led CIA analysts to conclude that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad.
He acknowledged that "some" of the information "came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques. But there were many other sources as well".
The controversial techniques were banned in 2009 by the US president, Barack Obama.
Mr Morell said that "whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved".
Mr Morell is widely believed to be a top candidate for the job of CIA director after the resignation of David Petreaus, America's most celebrated military leader in a generation. Mr Petreaus stepped down in November after admitting to an extramarital affair with his biographer.
Mr Morell's message echoes a statement decrying the Zero Dark Thirty interrogation scenes signed by three senators, including the Republican John McCain, who was a prisoner of war and torture victim during the Vietnam War.
In a letter to the head of Sony Pictures, Mr McCain and the Democratic senators Diane Feinstein and Carl Levin wrote that the film "clearly implies that the CIA's coercive interrogation techniques were effective" in obtaining information that would lead to bin Laden.
"We have reviewed CIA records and know that this is incorrect," the senators wrote. "We believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for [bin Laden] is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film's fictional narrative."
But two CIA officials active when suspects were tortured disputed those assertions.
Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw the CIA's counterterrorism operations when "harsh interrogation" methods were in use, wrote in The Washington Post in April that the path leading to bin Laden "started in a CIA black site ... and stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some [but not all] of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods".
And the former CIA director Michael Hayden wrote in The Wall Street Journal in June last year that a "crucial component" of information that eventually led to bin Laden came from three CIA prisoners, "all of whom had been subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation".
Mr Hayden claimed that he learnt the information when, in 2007, he was first briefed about pursuing bin Laden through his courier network.
But Mr Morell emphasised that the film, a likely Oscar contender, "takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate".
"What I want you to know is that Zero Dark Thirty is a dramatisation, not a realistic portrayal of the facts.
"[The] CIA interacted with the filmmakers through our Office of Public Affairs but, as is true with any entertainment project with which we interact, we do not control the final product."