Nelino Quafina was a male Antedean who served as the Federation Secretary of Military Intelligence under President Min Zife. By his race's standards, he was a handsome individual with large and well shaped cranial fins, exceptionally large eyes, and uniformly silver-gray scales.
During the Dominion War, Nelino Quafina was part of a plot by Zife and chief of staff Koll Azernal to install nadion-pulse cannons on the planet Tezwa. After Tezwan Prime Minister Kinchawn activated the cannons and used them to destroy a Klingon Defense Force fleet serving as backup to Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the USS Enterprise, Azernal and Quafina met on McKinley Station and plotted to plant misdirecting evidence on Tezwa implicating the Tholians on the construction of the cannons. (TNG novel: A Time to Kill)
Nelino Quafina hired Orion Syndicate crimeboss Ihazs to deliver an additional five contraband cargo shipments to Tezwa in an attempt to implicate the Tholians in the construction of the cannons. Ihazs initially refused to take the contract, citing a list of grievances which Nelino reluctantly agreed to, then offered ten thousand bricks of gold-pressed latinum up front, and the same after the contract was complete. In return, Ihazs offered the services of the merchantman Caedera under Captain Trenigar.
During the process, Azernal continued to fret the entire time, but Quafina remained annoyingly calm and sure about the process. It was not until Enterprise Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge began to question their orders through the Starfleet Corps of Engineers that Quafina began to realize there could be trouble on Tezwa. When the arrest warrant was issued for the Caedera and Ambassador Lagan Serra suspended the SCE workorders, Azernal insisted that Quafina needed to make the vessel and any evidence linking them to it vanish permanently.
The Caedera was eventually recovered by Starfleet forces after an undercover Section 31 operative, Erovan M'Rill, killed the entire crew. Reconstruction of the logs showed Quafina and Ihazs meeting with Trenigar, and DNA evidence from M'Rill's knife that he held to Quafina's neck confirmed his identity. Captain Picard, in conjunction with Admiral William Ross and other members of Starfleet Command, forced Quafina, Azernal, and Zife to resign; Quafina was subsequently killed, along with Zife and Azernal, by Section 31 for his actions. (TNG novel: A Time to Heal)