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SINGAPORE: When it was barely a week into independence, Singapore unknowingly stood in the line of fire already.
Declassified Australian diplomatic cables from 1965 reveal that Malaysian leaders had warned Commonwealth allies of a potential “military occupation of Singapore” — if the island should allow an Indonesian consulate or engage in any “funny business” with Beijing or Jakarta.
“I was quite surprised when I first saw this document,” says Abdul Rahman Yaacob, a research fellow in the Lowy Institute’s Southeast Asia programme.
“The fact that Malaysia indicated that it was willing to take military action … (is) a ‘wow’ in the history of Singapore.”
The new nation would have had almost no means of defending itself. It had just two infantry battalions, mostly made up of Malaysians, he cites.
Singapore’s military in its early days.
Drawing on private letters, eyewitness accounts and once-secret documents, CNA’s two-part documentary, Separation: Declassified, reveals just how fraught, contingent — and close to violent — Singapore’s independence was. The series will be released today.
It reveals how Singapore’s leaders concealed negotiations, even from the British; how the Separation Agreement was hammered out in a haze of midnight drinks; and how nuclear weapons were stashed at Tengah Air Base, hidden from the people they were meant to protect.
“If you’re a Hollywood producer trying to do a political drama, you couldn’t come up with a better script,” quips Han Fook Kwang, who co-wrote Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas.
Here are five things you may have never known about Singapore’s split with Malaysia:
The legal paperwork for the separation emerged from a night thick with drink and dread.
On Aug 6, 1965, Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee and Law Minister E.W. Barker met Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak in Kuala Lumpur to finalise the agreement.
Malaysia’s then deputy prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak (left), with Singapore’s then finance minister, Goh Keng Swee.
The process “was so slow”, Barker later recalled — as Razak’s typist, unused to legal phrasing, “made so many mistakes” — that help had to be summoned from Singapore House, KL.
Drinks were poured, and the group pressed on. “We ate, and we drank till past midnight. The documents were ready soon thereafter,” Barker said.
Barely anyone bothered to read through the final draft. “I was a little tipsy but decided to read the agreement, lest there be mistakes,” he added.
“Razak asked me what I was afraid of as it was my typist who typed the documents. I stopped reading and signed.”
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew later hailed the signing as a “bloodless coup” — a political revolution pulled off “right under the noses of the British”.
By the following evening, panic had set in at the British High Commission in KL. Lord Antony Head, the British High Commissioner in Malaysia, had just learnt of a “drastic step” to expel Singapore from Malaysia the next morning.
He jumped into his car and drove around the capital, desperate to confirm the news. At a rooftop restaurant, he finally cornered Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and pleaded for a 24-hour delay.
The Tunku and his colleagues were, as Head later put it, “obstinate in the way of conscious sinners”.
An artist’s rendition of Lord Antony Head’s arrival at Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman’s rooftop dinner.
Mark Frost, co-author of Singapore: A Biography, argues that Britain had assumed Lee and the Tunku, both British-educated lawyers, would find common ground. “There’s a misreading by the British of just how different (the two men) are politically,” he says.
While Lee championed a “Malaysian Malaysia” built on meritocracy and multiracial equality, the Tunku’s party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), clung to Malay primacy as the bedrock of the federation.
Through the night, a flurry of urgent telegrams were sent to London in a diplomatic scramble.
The split was deemed such a disaster that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson abandoned his holiday and rushed to government district Whitehall to make sense of the situation, narrates Nicholas White, co-editor of Singapore – Two Hundred Years of the Lion City.
The episode was career-ending for Lord Head, and Britain’s grand regional strategy also lay in ruins.
Lord Head and his wife, Lady Dorothea Head, during their visit to Singapore in 1954, when he was British secretary of state for war. (Photo: Ministry of Information and the Arts Collection, courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore)
As for Lee, he believed his life could be in danger as UMNO hardliners agitated against him in the weeks leading up to Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. In a declassified letter, he confided to British officials:
Security for Lee tightened after the separation. Oxley Road, his family home, was a soft target, not built to withstand an attack. Steel plates were hastily fitted to its windows as bulletproof glass was being made.
Lee and his wife temporarily moved to Changi Cottage, beside a Royal Air Force base, while their children remained in Oxley Road to continue school.
An artist’s rendition of the improvised security arrangements at the Lees’ Oxley Road residence.
Weeks after independence, his fears nearly materialised. On Aug 26, 1965, police unveiled a plot by the clandestine People’s Revolutionary Party of Singapore, a communist organisation from Jakarta that sought to establish a communist state through armed rebellion.
Its plans included targeted killings of ministers, police officers and, most likely, Lee himself. Police eventually arrested 20 operatives and smashed their rebellion.
“It’s hard for us to envisage the situation, but back then, the entire enterprise of what we now call Singapore could’ve been taken down or taken out by assassination,” says Shashi Jayakumar, founder and executive director of SJK Geostrategic Advisory.
“That would’ve been curtains for Singapore.”
Dr Shashi Jayakumar, the founder and executive director of SJK Geostrategic Advisory, speaking to CNA.
Today, one of the most indelible images in Singapore’s history is that of a tearful prime minister explaining the separation. But that television moment when Lee broke down almost never made it on air.
He had asked P.S. Raman, the then director of broadcasting at Television Singapura, to cut the footage. Raman urged him to reconsider, and the scene remained.
“It showed Singaporeans that this was a desperate time to the extent that even Mr Lee broke down,” says former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, who was 11 then and Raman’s son. “It’s something that could’ve helped rally people.”
After his broadcasting career, P.S. Raman served as Singapore’s ambassador to Indonesia, then as High Commissioner in Australia and later as the ambassador in the Soviet Union.
Lee’s tears reflected more than the stress and exhaustion of three sleepless nights. There was also guilt.
“Lee Kuan Yew started crying in the middle of a press interview … because he felt very guilty about leaving so many people behind who believed in him,” says Faridah Stephens, daughter of Sabah’s first chief minister.
Her father, Donald Stephens, was among those who felt abandoned and betrayed. In a letter addressed to “Harry”, he wrote: “Never in my wildest dreams would I have believed that Harry Lee Kuan Yew was a quitter.
“Now I find that the friend, the idol, is made of cheap clay after all.”
Just as the separation came as a bombshell to many people, declassified files now show that there were secrets aplenty in those times. For example, Tengah Air Base was a linchpin in British defence planners’ Cold War nuclear strategy.
Inside a hangar in Tengah Air Base today.
As early as 1958, Tengah had been earmarked as the most viable base in the region for hosting V-bombers — aircraft designed to carry nuclear warheads — and countering communist China’s growing power.
“If we are to retain our position in the Far East, … it is essential that V-bombers … should be capable of operating from Singapore,” one memo declared. “No other airfield in the area would satisfy this requirement.”
By the time of merger, the plan was reality. A declassified 1963 document states: “Nuclear weapons were already available in Singapore.”
Crews were trained to handle them, but secrecy was absolute. British officials were told to display “dummy weapons” if questioned and to offer “no comment” if pressed.
Even the Tunku was kept in the dark. The political fallout of admitting, even to local leaders, that Singapore had become a nuclear outpost would have been too high.
A screenshot of file footage of the Tunku.
The separation in 1965 unnerved London. Overnight, some of Britain’s deadliest weapons were sitting on the soil of a fragile, newly independent state.
Six years later, most British troops had withdrawn. But what became of those nuclear warheads, and how long they stayed, remains unknown to this day.
Catch the two-part series Separation: Declassified on CNA Insider’s YouTube page from 4pm today. Or watch the TV premiere tomorrow at 9pm.
Source: CNA/fl(dp)
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FAST
SINGAPORE: When it was barely a week into independence, Singapore unknowingly stood in the line of fire already.
Declassified Australian diplomatic cables from 1965 reveal that Malaysian leaders had warned Commonwealth allies of a potential “military occupation of Singapore” — if the island should allow an Indonesian consulate or engage in any “funny business” with Beijing or Jakarta.
“I was quite surprised when I first saw this document,” says Abdul Rahman Yaacob, a research fellow in the Lowy Institute’s Southeast Asia programme.
“The fact that Malaysia indicated that it was willing to take military action … (is) a ‘wow’ in the history of Singapore.”
The new nation would have had almost no means of defending itself. It had just two infantry battalions, mostly made up of Malaysians, he cites.
Singapore’s military in its early days.
Drawing on private letters, eyewitness accounts and once-secret documents, CNA’s two-part documentary, Separation: Declassified, reveals just how fraught, contingent — and close to violent — Singapore’s independence was. The series will be released today.
It reveals how Singapore’s leaders concealed negotiations, even from the British; how the Separation Agreement was hammered out in a haze of midnight drinks; and how nuclear weapons were stashed at Tengah Air Base, hidden from the people they were meant to protect.
“If you’re a Hollywood producer trying to do a political drama, you couldn’t come up with a better script,” quips Han Fook Kwang, who co-wrote Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas.
Here are five things you may have never known about Singapore’s split with Malaysia:
1. SINGAPORE’S DESTINY WAS SIGNED OVER DRINKS
The legal paperwork for the separation emerged from a night thick with drink and dread.
On Aug 6, 1965, Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee and Law Minister E.W. Barker met Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak in Kuala Lumpur to finalise the agreement.
Malaysia’s then deputy prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak (left), with Singapore’s then finance minister, Goh Keng Swee.
The process “was so slow”, Barker later recalled — as Razak’s typist, unused to legal phrasing, “made so many mistakes” — that help had to be summoned from Singapore House, KL.
Drinks were poured, and the group pressed on. “We ate, and we drank till past midnight. The documents were ready soon thereafter,” Barker said.
Barely anyone bothered to read through the final draft. “I was a little tipsy but decided to read the agreement, lest there be mistakes,” he added.
“Razak asked me what I was afraid of as it was my typist who typed the documents. I stopped reading and signed.”
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew later hailed the signing as a “bloodless coup” — a political revolution pulled off “right under the noses of the British”.
Related articles:
2. BRITAIN FOUND OUT ONLY THE NIGHT BEFORE
By the following evening, panic had set in at the British High Commission in KL. Lord Antony Head, the British High Commissioner in Malaysia, had just learnt of a “drastic step” to expel Singapore from Malaysia the next morning.
He jumped into his car and drove around the capital, desperate to confirm the news. At a rooftop restaurant, he finally cornered Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and pleaded for a 24-hour delay.
The Tunku and his colleagues were, as Head later put it, “obstinate in the way of conscious sinners”.
An artist’s rendition of Lord Antony Head’s arrival at Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman’s rooftop dinner.
Mark Frost, co-author of Singapore: A Biography, argues that Britain had assumed Lee and the Tunku, both British-educated lawyers, would find common ground. “There’s a misreading by the British of just how different (the two men) are politically,” he says.
While Lee championed a “Malaysian Malaysia” built on meritocracy and multiracial equality, the Tunku’s party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), clung to Malay primacy as the bedrock of the federation.
Through the night, a flurry of urgent telegrams were sent to London in a diplomatic scramble.
The split was deemed such a disaster that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson abandoned his holiday and rushed to government district Whitehall to make sense of the situation, narrates Nicholas White, co-editor of Singapore – Two Hundred Years of the Lion City.
The episode was career-ending for Lord Head, and Britain’s grand regional strategy also lay in ruins.
Lord Head and his wife, Lady Dorothea Head, during their visit to Singapore in 1954, when he was British secretary of state for war. (Photo: Ministry of Information and the Arts Collection, courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore)
3. LEE KUAN YEW FEARED ASSASSINATION
As for Lee, he believed his life could be in danger as UMNO hardliners agitated against him in the weeks leading up to Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. In a declassified letter, he confided to British officials:
Security for Lee tightened after the separation. Oxley Road, his family home, was a soft target, not built to withstand an attack. Steel plates were hastily fitted to its windows as bulletproof glass was being made.
Lee and his wife temporarily moved to Changi Cottage, beside a Royal Air Force base, while their children remained in Oxley Road to continue school.
An artist’s rendition of the improvised security arrangements at the Lees’ Oxley Road residence.
Weeks after independence, his fears nearly materialised. On Aug 26, 1965, police unveiled a plot by the clandestine People’s Revolutionary Party of Singapore, a communist organisation from Jakarta that sought to establish a communist state through armed rebellion.
Its plans included targeted killings of ministers, police officers and, most likely, Lee himself. Police eventually arrested 20 operatives and smashed their rebellion.
“It’s hard for us to envisage the situation, but back then, the entire enterprise of what we now call Singapore could’ve been taken down or taken out by assassination,” says Shashi Jayakumar, founder and executive director of SJK Geostrategic Advisory.
“That would’ve been curtains for Singapore.”
Dr Shashi Jayakumar, the founder and executive director of SJK Geostrategic Advisory, speaking to CNA.
4. LEE’S TEARS WERE ALMOST NEVER AIRED
Today, one of the most indelible images in Singapore’s history is that of a tearful prime minister explaining the separation. But that television moment when Lee broke down almost never made it on air.
He had asked P.S. Raman, the then director of broadcasting at Television Singapura, to cut the footage. Raman urged him to reconsider, and the scene remained.
“It showed Singaporeans that this was a desperate time to the extent that even Mr Lee broke down,” says former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, who was 11 then and Raman’s son. “It’s something that could’ve helped rally people.”
After his broadcasting career, P.S. Raman served as Singapore’s ambassador to Indonesia, then as High Commissioner in Australia and later as the ambassador in the Soviet Union.
Lee’s tears reflected more than the stress and exhaustion of three sleepless nights. There was also guilt.
“Lee Kuan Yew started crying in the middle of a press interview … because he felt very guilty about leaving so many people behind who believed in him,” says Faridah Stephens, daughter of Sabah’s first chief minister.
Her father, Donald Stephens, was among those who felt abandoned and betrayed. In a letter addressed to “Harry”, he wrote: “Never in my wildest dreams would I have believed that Harry Lee Kuan Yew was a quitter.
“Now I find that the friend, the idol, is made of cheap clay after all.”
5. TENGAH AIR BASE HAD A NUCLEAR ARSENAL
Just as the separation came as a bombshell to many people, declassified files now show that there were secrets aplenty in those times. For example, Tengah Air Base was a linchpin in British defence planners’ Cold War nuclear strategy.
Inside a hangar in Tengah Air Base today.
As early as 1958, Tengah had been earmarked as the most viable base in the region for hosting V-bombers — aircraft designed to carry nuclear warheads — and countering communist China’s growing power.
“If we are to retain our position in the Far East, … it is essential that V-bombers … should be capable of operating from Singapore,” one memo declared. “No other airfield in the area would satisfy this requirement.”
By the time of merger, the plan was reality. A declassified 1963 document states: “Nuclear weapons were already available in Singapore.”
Crews were trained to handle them, but secrecy was absolute. British officials were told to display “dummy weapons” if questioned and to offer “no comment” if pressed.
Even the Tunku was kept in the dark. The political fallout of admitting, even to local leaders, that Singapore had become a nuclear outpost would have been too high.
A screenshot of file footage of the Tunku.
The separation in 1965 unnerved London. Overnight, some of Britain’s deadliest weapons were sitting on the soil of a fragile, newly independent state.
Six years later, most British troops had withdrawn. But what became of those nuclear warheads, and how long they stayed, remains unknown to this day.
Catch the two-part series Separation: Declassified on CNA Insider’s YouTube page from 4pm today. Or watch the TV premiere tomorrow at 9pm.
You may also be interested in:
Source: CNA/fl(dp)
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