WASHINGTON — After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin laden in Pakistan in May 2011, top CIA officials secretly told lawmakers that information gleaned from brutal interrogations played a key role in what was one of the spy agency’s greatest successes.

Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta repeated that assertion in public, and it found its way into a critically acclaimed movie about the operation, “Zero Dark Thirty,” which depicts a detainee offering up the identity of bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, after being tortured at a secret CIA interrogation site. As it turned out, bin Laden was living in al-Kuwaiti’s walled family compound, so tracking the courier was the key to finding the al-Qaida leader.

But the CIA’s story, like the Hollywood one, is just not true, the Senate report on CIA interrogations concludes in a 14,000-word section of the report’s public summary.

“A review of CIA records found that the initial intelligence obtained, as well as the information the CIA identified as the most critical or the most valuable on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, was not related to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Senate investigation found.

CIA officials disagree, and maintain that detainees subjected to coercive tactics provided crucial details.

The Senate report, released Tuesday, attempts to methodically debunk the CIA’s case. Investigators found that the CIA repeatedly mischaracterized to congressional oversight committees what information about al-Kuwaiti and bin Laden came from detainees after they were brutally interrogated, and that in many cases, they discussed the courier before being subjected to rough treatment.

The report also points out that the CIA didn’t receive any information from CIA detainees on al-Kuwaiti until 2003. Yet by the end of 2002, the CIA had gathered significant information about al-Kuwaiti and his close links to bin Laden.

In its response, the CIA said the intelligence “was insufficient to distinguish al-Kuwaiti from many other bin Laden associates until additional information from detainees put it into context and allowed CIA to better understand his true role and potential in the hunt for bin Laden. As such, the information CIA obtained from these detainees did play a role — in combination with other streams of intelligence — in finding the al-Qaida leader.”

The CIA also said that two detainees, Ammar al-Baluchi and Hassan Ghul, provided crucial information. Al-Baluchi, after undergoing enhanced interrogation techniques, “was the first detainee to reveal what apparently was a carefully guarded al-Qaida secret — that Abu Ahmad served as a courier for messages to and from bin Laden,” the CIA said.