I finally got it working; for the most part lol

It is still hanging after creating the tunnel. I think this is because the SSH after the tunnel is open flips to the host machine.

ie I am in "Dev" environment, so I log into that via ssh. Send my tunnel command to "login" environment, at this point it hangs, but it did open the pid. I think it has something to do with the flipping, same reason I couldn't directly send the telnet through the SSH connection originally

To get around this I have forked the SSH sub, so that my telnet stuff will run regardless. Since it wouldn't wait for the sub routine what I ended up doing was adding a small sleep timer to give the tunnel time to establish

Thanks for your help!