Strange output in UTF-16BE

Hi,
I have the following issue in kannel 1.4.1:

My smsbox is configured to exec the following command for the default keyword:
echo "%C|%b"

I have a cellphone that send data in UTF-16BE charset. I send an sms
with the single digit '1'. This is what gets echoed:

UTF-16BE|%0E%001

When the phone is configured to write right-to-left text (hebrew in my
case), then the same digit arrives as:

UTF-16BE|%0F%001
i.e. the 'E' turned to F.

In any case, the Kannel doc says that the %b parameter will print the
original sms in binary form. Yet, the text above does not seem to be
in UTF-16BE charset. In other words, the binary buffer { 0x0f, 0x00,
0x31 } is not a valid UTF-16BE string. This is quite easy to see,
since UTF-16 charsets must ALWAYS come in 16-bit elements: 2 bytes, 4
bytes, 6 bytes, 8 bytes, etc. The buffer above is 3 bytes long.

any ideas why Kannel states this is a UTF-16BE message but provides it
in some different encoding? How am I supposed to decode this back into
the original string of "1" ?

thanks...