PUBLISHED ONDecember 07, 2025 6:06 AMBYSean LerThe Albatross File — created, named and kept by Singapore's first Defence Minister Goh Keng Swee — sheds new and never-before-published insights on the story of Singapore's separation from Malaysia on Aug 9, 1965.
It contains cabinet papers, conversation records and handwritten notes detailing vividly a "dramatic, blow-by-blow record" of how Singapore came to separate from Malaysia.
Speaking at the launch of the Albatross File exhibition and a 488-page book titled The Albatross File: Inside Separation at the National Library along Victoria Street on Sunday (Dec 7), Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong said he decided, when he was prime minister, to declassify and publish the file.
SM Lee said he also asked for the file to be published alongside relevant extracts from the oral histories of key participants involved in the separation, to bring together and put on public record a "full documented account" of the separation, which he describes as "a seminal event" in Singapore's independence journey.
Then-Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman had said at that time that the decision to kick Singapore out of Malaysia was his solely.
In fact, Lee Kuan Yew's speech in the Malaysian Parliament on May 27, 1965, which spoke about the inadequacies of race-based politics, and called for a "Malaysian Malaysia", was described by the Tunku himself as "the straw that broke the camel's back".
Historians have described the outcome from the ensuing weeks of negotiations between the Tunku's deputy Tun Abdul Razak and Dr Goh in July and August 1965 as a "mutually negotiated outcome".
SM Lee shared that Lee Kuan Yew had recounted in his oral history and memoirs that he had instructed Dr Goh to press for a looser constitution re-arrangement within Malaysia, with separation as an option only if Singapore couldn't get such a re-arrangement.
In 1994, when preparing his memoirs, Lee Kuan Yew received Dr Goh's permission to read his oral history.
It was only then that Lee Kuan Yew discovered that contrary to his instructions, Dr Goh had gone for a break from the start, and not the looser federation preferred by Lee.
SM Lee shared that Lee Kuan Yew was "so astonished" that he made note of this.
He said: "In the margin of the transcript of Dr Goh's oral history, next to the passage where Dr Goh confirmed that it was he, not Razak, who has suggested separation, Mr Lee wrote: '1st time read on Aug 22, 1994, 5.40pm in office.'"
The page with Lee Kuan Yew's marginal note is now on display at the Albatross exhibition.
Even though it was Dr Goh who was convinced that merger was doomed and had pressed for total separation, Singapore's founding leaders eventually concluded that separation "was the best thing that ever happened to Singapore", said SM Lee.
He added that on Dr Goh's part, he was determined and said: "I'd had enough of Malaysia. I just wanted to get out. I could see no future in it, the political cost was dreadful and the economic benefits, well, didn't exist. So it was an exercise in futility... it was a project that should be abandoned once you saw that it was worthless."
Pointing to how Lee Kuan Yew was prepared to risk all, including his life, when he stood up to the radicals in the United Malays National Organisation, and how the founding leaders stood by him when there were threats to arrest him, SM Lee said that these are "enduring lessons" for Singapore.
"Trust in Government, and in the political leadership in particular, is founded on the people knowing their leaders will always have their backs," said SM Lee, adding that Singapore's founding leaders won the right to govern because Singaporeans were convinced that their leaders could not be intimidated into compromising Singapore's interests.
He said that the other lesson was to never take Singapore's racial and religious harmony for granted, referring to the racial tensions between the Malay and Chinese communities between 1963 and 1964.
Although the separation took place six decades ago, SM Lee encouraged Singaporeans to experience the exhibition and book.
"You will realise it was hardly foreordained.
"It was — and still is — a miracle," he said.
For booking of tickets and more information, visit the National Library Board's website for the exhibition.
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