The cold cell is a Central Intelligence Agency interrogation technique that was applied at agency black sites despite never having been authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice or the President. Kiriakou has called it worse than waterboarding, and has described it, across dozens of interviews, in essentially identical terms.[1][2]
Procedure
The detainee is stripped naked and chained to an eyebolt fixed to the ceiling, in a position from which they cannot sit down, kneel, lie down, or otherwise relieve their stance. The cell temperature is reduced to 50°F (10°C). Every hour, a CIA officer enters the cell and douses the detainee with a bucket of ice water.[1][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
The one account in which Kiriakou attaches the full procedure to a named prisoner rather than describing it in the abstract concerns Gul Rahman: “Gul Rahman was subjected to a torture technique called the cold cell, in which he was chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling like this. He was stripped naked. His cell was chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and then every hour a CIA officer would enter the cell and throw a bucket of ice water on him.”[12]
Fatalities
We murdered two prisoners with that technique. That was never approved as a technique.[1]
Kiriakou has given the death toll inconsistently across interviews. In several tellings he specifies exactly two prisoners killed by hypothermia, adding in one account that the body was simply buried behind the building;[1][4][3] in others he says the technique killed “multiple prisoners,” killed people “more than once,” or killed “another prisoner” in addition to a prior death — without ever giving an exact count above two.[9][13][10][5]
Authorization status
The cold cell was not among the techniques authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel under the formal enhanced interrogation program, and Kiriakou says it was used nonetheless.[1][14] It belongs to the category of techniques applied by individual CIA officers outside the program’s formal legal cover.
No CIA officer has been criminally prosecuted for any of the cold-cell deaths.[15][13]
As described to Dr. Phil
Kiriakou’s 2025 account of the technique is unchanged in its particulars: the prisoner was stripped naked and chained by the wrists to an eyebolt in the ceiling, the cell was chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and every hour a CIA officer entered and threw a bucket of ice water over him. He states flatly that several prisoners were murdered this way and died of hypothermia.[16] He ranks the cold cell, with sleep deprivation, among the techniques he considered worse than waterboarding.[17]
”There are two next best things”
Asked in May 2026 what came after waterboarding in the CIA’s repertoire, Kiriakou named two techniques and put the cold cell first. His description of it is unchanged in every particular from accounts given a decade earlier: the prisoner is stripped naked, chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, the cell is chilled to 50°F, and “every hour you throw a bucket of ice water on him.” The second of the two was sleep deprivation.[18]
The 2013 description
One of Kiriakou”s earliest public descriptions of the technique, given days after his sentencing in January 2013, gives the temperature band and the interval together: the cold cell is where interrogators “put a prisoner naked in a cell chilled to 50 or 55 degrees, and then every hour throw ice water on him.” He placed it, with sleep deprivation, above waterboarding in severity — “I actually think those last two are worse” — a ranking he has kept to since.[19]