My sources for The Finish included six C.I.A. analysts who traced for me in detail how, over years, their painstaking and often frustrating work led them to the compound in Abbottabad. I interviewed J.S.O.C. commander Admiral William McRaven, who helped plan and who oversaw the mission, and members of his staff. Some of the others (without listing their job titles) were Tony Blinken, John Brennan, Benjamin Rhodes, James Clark, Thomas Donilon, Michèle Flournoy, Larry James, Michael Morell, William Ostlund, David Petraeus, Samantha Power, James Poss, Denis McDonough, Nick Rasmussen, Michael Scheuer, Gary Schroen, Kalev Sepp, Michael Sheehan, and Michael Vickers. These sources—and others—worked on the case in various capacities for years and were present and often involved in the key decisions that led to the mission.

Over the last three years, many other key participants have written and spoken publicly about their roles in the story, confirming and adding to the one I wrote, from Vice President Joe Biden to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Secretary of Defense Bob Gates to former C.I.A. director Leon Panetta to two of the SEALs who actually participated in the raid. Although there are minor discrepancies in accounts, typical of any story that involves a great number of people, none substantially contradict the story I wrote. The same story was independently and exhaustively reported by Peter Bergen in his book Manhunt, and a piece of it was initially reported by Nicholas Schmidle in The New Yorker. All of these accounts, in every major way, concur.

Seymour Hersh arrived late to the game, bringing with him an unmatched reputation for investigative coups—from My Lai to Abu Ghraib—and a scrappy anti-establishment attitude. His two sources told him a different tale. But for his to be true, every one of my sources was lying. And not just my sources, but those for Bergen, Schmidle, and others, too. Also the two SEALs who have told their own versions of the raid. All of them had to be in on the lie.

If bin Laden was found because a Pakistani source simply handed over the information, if Pakistan had confirmed bin Laden’s presence in the compound in advance of the mission and had permitted the SEAL team to fly in and out of Abbottabad unmolested, and if the SEALs had thrown bin Laden’s body from a helicopter instead of burying him at sea, then every person I interviewed in the C.I.A., J.S.O.C., State Department, White House, Pentagon, and elsewhere told me a coordinated lie. This is not simply a matter of spin, or interpreting information differently. The story I told is so much different that, for Hersh to be correct, every significant turn of events I reported was a lie—and not just a lie, but a lie carefully and deftly coordinated, in that my interviews were all conducted separately over the course of more than a year at many different times and places. The process by which the C.I.A. became interested in the compound in Abbottobad, a lie. The months-long efforts undertaken to confirm whether bin Laden lived there, including the enlistment of a Pakistani doctor to open a hepatitis clinic there in an effort to procure a DNA sample from the compound (the doctor is still imprisoned in Pakistan), a lie. The various options weighed by mission planners and presented to the president, a lie. The process by which Obama narrowed down his choices and weighed them before making his decision, a lie. And so on.

If the Hersh version is true, and bin Laden’s location was simply handed over to the U.S., then the C.I.A. analysts who sat around the table with me at Langley were all lying about how they found and then investigated the compound; then Panetta was lying in his book about the various methods he employed over months to try to nail down the identity of the man hiding there; then Mike Morrell was lying to me in his office overlooking the Potomac when he described how he told Obama that the likelihood that the man hiding in the compound was bin Laden was just 60 percent. If Pakistan approved the raid in advance, then McRaven was lying to me over a dinner in Alexandria about how he worried until his forces cleared that country’s airspace; then David Petraeus was lying to me at his home in Ft. McNair when he described monitoring the mission from a control center in Bagram with a rapid aerial response force waiting to rescue the SEAL team choppers if they were discovered; then Michèle Flournoy was lying to me at a Starbucks in Washington, D.C., when she described urging Secretary of Defense Gates to reconsider after he voted against sending in the SEALs (too risky, he thought, but Flournoy helped change his mind). And so on.