 At the same time that the Buddhist crisis was taking, a French diplomatic initiative to end the war had launched known to the historians as the "Maneli affair", after Mieczysław Maneli, the Polish Commissioner to the International Control Commission who served as an intermediary between the two Vietnams.In 1963, North Vietnam was suffering its worse drought in a generation, and Maneli had carried messages back and fourth between Hanoi and Saigon under which a ceasefire would be declared in exchange for a barter trade would be launched with South Vietnamese rice to be traded for North Vietnamese coal.On 2 September 1963, Maneli met with Nhu at his office in the Gia Long Palace, a meeting that Nhu subsequently leaked to the American columnist Joseph Alsop, who revealed it to the world in his "A Matter of Fact" column in the "Washington Post".