Upside-Down Yellow Wastebasket

The Upside-Down Yellow Wastebasket was Bob Woodward’s discreet, one-way signal for initiating contact with Deep Throat. A plain household object placed on a fire escape, it turned an apartment’s limited architecture into a communication system—and made the signal depend on Woodward’s ability to move safely through a watched city.

Purpose and Design

At their last meeting, Woodward told Deep Throat that his new apartment had no balcony for the flowerpot and flag they had used before. He also worried that neighbors routinely had newspapers taken from outside their doors. After inspecting the building’s less obvious features—including back stairways, fire exits, and window sills—Woodward and Deep Throat adopted a replacement: Woodward would place his yellow kitchen wastepaper basket upside down on the fire escape. The arrangement was deliberately one-way; the basket was Woodward’s means of initiating communication.

A Signal Delayed

The system had not been tested when Woodward’s new upstairs neighbors began dancing between one and four in the morning. His attempts to quiet them, including banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and asking them to consider a sock hop, only rallied the dancers. The disturbance added to a period of frustration that had begun with the Haldeman story, and Woodward decided to move again rather than risk extending what he regarded as a bad cycle.

He turned the basket upside down only once during this interval, in late December, to tell Deep Throat that he was moving. Their brief meeting produced no new information: Deep Throat advised him to wait and see how the Watergate trial developed. The signal thus served first as a practical notice of disruption, not as the start of regular contact.

Activation and Significance

After finding an apartment in a high-rise near the Potomac, Woodward obtained a new flower pot and resumed the arrangement. The wastebasket signal’s service began on January 24, after several quiet nights in the new quarters. To reach the garage, Woodward left through a basement exit, crossed a rear courtyard, climbed over a wall, and continued to a side street, mindful of Katharine Graham’s warning about surveillance and of Deep Throat’s growing apprehension. He then had to find a cab; when the driver could not make change for his ten-dollar bill after dropping him about half a mile from the garage, Woodward angrily told him to keep it.

The object’s significance lies in its modesty and its dependence on circumstance. It was not a self-sufficient channel: a disrupted apartment, the need to relocate, concern about surveillance, and the difficult journey to the meeting place all shaped whether the signal could be used. A yellow wastebasket, inverted in view, converted those ordinary domestic surroundings into a cautious means of contact.