The standard account was "false", Hersh wrote in the London Review of Books, "as are many other elements of the Obama Administration's account" which he attacked as an Alice in Wonderland confection that "might have been written by Lewis Carroll".
Contrary to the official story, in which the CIA tracked down bin Laden by tracing the phone of one of his couriers, Hersh claims that the primary intelligence came in October 2010 from a "walk-in" to the CIA station in Islamabad.
The Pakistani intelligence officer revealed bin Laden's whereabouts to Jonathan Bank, the then CIA station chief, in exchange for part of the US$25 million reward that the US had offered for information leading to bin Laden's death or capture.
That information, according to Hersh's account, set in train a six-month bargaining process involving high-level Pakistani officials, including General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI.
Bank's withdrawal from Pakistan in December 2010 after his cover was blown was part of a smokescreen operation to cover up the US-Pakistan agreement over bin Laden.
The Hersh account was met with widespread scepticism in the US by intelligence analysts and former members of the CIA, including Michael Morrell, who was deputy director of the CIA from 2010 to 2013.
"The source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he's talking about," Morrell said.
Peter Bergen, the long-time security analyst for CNN who produced the first television interview with bin Laden in 1997, was scathing in his dismissal. "Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense."
Max Fisher, writing in Vox, said: "His allegations are largely supported only by two sources, neither of whom has direct knowledge of what happened, both of whom are retired, and one of whom is anonymous. The story is riven with internal contradictions and inconsistencies."
Hersh was sticking to his guns, however. He told CNN he had "vetted" and "verified" the sources and information. "You know, I've been around a long time, long of tooth in this business, and I understand the consequences of saying what I'm saying."
Author mired in controversy
Seymour Hersh won a Pulitzer prize in the 1970s for his reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and also helped break the story of the US maltreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2004.
He has since become controversial for his apparent willingness to embrace conspiracy theories. In 2013 the London Review of Books published a Hersh article in which he cited anonymous intelligence sources blaming the Nusra Front for the August 2013 sarin gas attack in Ghouta, Damascus. Vox said he's claimed that much of the US special forces are controlled by secret members of Opus Dei and that the US flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training.
