I found a few people asking how to automate scripts using ssh with the -f option but not many solutions. Th -f option makes the ssh process fork into the background once started, but since it doesn't give you it's PID it becomes hard to kill it once the script ends.
The solution is to setup a control channel with -M. This allows you to communicate to the ssh process and close it down when your process finishes. For example, here is how I open a VNC connection to my desktop at work, which involves going through a corporate ssh firewall box.
ssh -M -S /tmp/vncssh-firewall.ctl -L 2022:desktop.internal.company.com:22 -f -N username@firewall.company.com ssh -M -S /tmp/vncssh-localhost.ctl -N -p 2022 -L 5901:localhost:5901 -f -N username@localhost xtightvncviewer -encodings tight localhost:1 ssh -S /tmp/vncssh-firewall.ctl -O exit localhost ssh -S /tmp/vncssh-localhost.ctl -O exit firewall.company.com