President Jimmy Carter decided upon a secret mission in April to rescue the hostages. He named the mission "Eagle Claw." Carter did not have many supporters because many thought that the rescue mission was doomed to fail due to it being hastily thrown together. Carter prepared a total of eight helicopters and a handful of C-130 cargo aircrafts for the mission because Teheran was a city surrounded by seven-hundred miles of desert on all sides and had a population of four million people. The target, the American Embassy, was very large and heavily guarded. The rescue was soon aborted due to operating problems of one helicopter and two choppers swirled into a dust storm (haboob). While aborting the mission, one chopper received a miscommunication to lift off. The dust storm caused it to crash into an aircraft, killing three people in the helicopter and five in the aircraft. When the Iranian's get word of the American self-defeat, they caused major humiliation for the United States. The secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, resigned in protest of the mission that he had originally objected to.