Hello and welcome this is the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there this week the coup that changed the course of the Vietnam War

in Saigon eight years of changed the Plus from America the Manson family murders. I mean the very thought of young girls dressed in black armed with sharp knives entering the homes of total strangers in

the middle of the night. It's the nightmarish nature of these

murders that terrified so many people.

And an East German musical icon. My mother had very modest ambitions for her son. She just wanted me to

save the world and build up communism or as she put it avenge my father who'd

fought against the Nazis and been murdered.

That's all coming up later, but we begin this week by looking at one of the most dramatic

and untold stories in Saudi Arabia's history.

Much of the authority of the ruling house of Soud in the kingdom is derived from their titular responsibility as keepers of the holy sites, meaning that they hold sway over the most important mosques in Islam at Mecca and Medina.

That authority though was challenged in 1979

when armed members of an ultra-conservative Salafist group

took control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

Hundreds were killed in the ensuing Battle for Control.

Ellie Melke reports. The 20th of November 1979, its symbolic date, the turn of a new century, the year 1400 in the Islamic calendar, at times the

symbolic date, the year 1400 in the Islamic calendar, a time for renewal according to tradition.

That morning, the Grand Mosque and Mecca,

the haram was full of tens of thousands of pilgrims

from all over the world awaiting the dawn prayer.

The mosque is built around the Caba, a black square building, the holiest site in Islam.

As the prayers came to an end, a group of 200 worshippers dressed in white

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