[1] At the age of 18, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and piloted an Avro Lancaster heavy bomber in World War II, surviving having to bail out over England returning from a mission.
[4] The Sheardowns left Tehran days before the CIA smuggled the six Americans out of the country under fake Canadian passports on January 27, 1980.
[1] He lobbied for his wife, ineligible as a British citizen who had never lived in Canada, to be awarded the same honour, which she received in 1981[1] on an honorary basis through the intervention of Flora MacDonald.
John and Zena Sheardown were portrayed in the 1981 Canadian-American television movie Escape from Iran: The Canadian Caper by Chris Wiggins and Diana Barrington, respectively.
After the big-budget Hollywood movie Argo about the Canadian Caper was released in 2012, director Ben Affleck called to personally apologize to the Sheardowns for having to leave them out due to plot and time constraints,[2] stating in a later interview, "It really did break my heart a bit.